Home Bridge Booze Her
by lauracronismo
Summary: Ten years is a long time, and so many things were left unsaid. When Rory found that little list written on the margins of a book, she needed to track the meaning behind each bullet point - including the only word he did not cross. A Literati account of the handful of moments Rory and Jess had together since their last brief meeting in 2006 until that longing look in 2016.
1. Chronicle of a Death Foretold

The town square was even noisier than Rory remembered it could be. The gazebo was all red, white and blue, blinding her as it reflected the mid-day sunlight. She had already seen a lot of familiar faces and the feeling of home was already settling in; she hadn't even put her bags down yet, but she knew that, pretty soon, it would be as if she had never left. Shame it would last so little.

"Rory, dear! Are we finally getting you back for good?"

"Oh I wish, miss Patty. I have some campaign souvenirs for you, I know you have a little thing for the senator."

"Oh sure honey, let's call it a 'little thing'."

She would not complain too much. The last time she could be around for this long – four entire days - was Christmas; it was better to make the most out of the crumbs she got. And it was especially bittersweet this time: for the last year or so in the Obama campaign trail, she did not have a home outside of Stars Hollow. She had spent that year inside buses and motels, going up and down the country, never spending more than a few weeks, tops, in the same place. She had covered all sorts of unprestigious and unremarkable little rallies and events. Now the senator had won the nomination and she had finally landed a somewhat more prestigious job, covering the campaign headquarters' every move - and she would finally have a somewhat permanent home, with a somewhat permanent bed and a sadly permanent rent.

She was excited, but still. The thought of having somewhere else to call home weirded her out. She stopped for a second, taking in the noisy, colorful mess of Stars Hollow in the Fourth of July. Home. Then she headed out to her actual house, in the slowest of paces, stopping to chat with everyone she met in the way.

She finally got there, dropped her bags on the porch, and noticed the note on the front door.

 _"_ _Hon,_

 _holiday disaster at the inn. Be back ASAP._

 _Got you some boxes in case you want to start the packing._

 _Actually please start the packing, I won't help since it is too much for my motherly heart to take._

 _Also, it is super boring hard work._

 _Mom_

 _P.S wait for me to order dinner or your ass can fly back to Montana"_

Rory smiled. Just the sight of Lorelai's handwriting was already comforting. She lazily pulled the bags into the living room and proceeded to go make some coffee.

\- x -

She woke up in her goldenly lit childhood bedroom. Oh god, jetlag is a bitch.

Her mother sure wasn't home yet. If she was, Rory wouldn't have woken up on her own. Also there would never be that much quiet with Lorelai in the house.

She glanced at the laptop she had left open on the bed when she fell asleep. She had been checking the news and her work emails – no matter what she did, those emails were always pilling up. "Oh man, just because I thought about it, here comes another one", she began ranting to herself. "How can I ever enjoy the peaceful holiday I earned through sleepless nights and dangerous caffeine intakes (even for my Olympic standards) if my inbox keeps buzzing like that?, I know, I just _know_ I will be thinking about work all - the damn – time, seriously…"

Wait. It was not a work email, it was her landlord. Landlady, actually. Her lessor, if you will. Her deposit had cleared and her new home was waiting.

Rory stared at the email a little longer. It felt so grown-up. The last year had been so fun and adventurous in a way she hadn't even thought she would be able to handle; still, now it felt like she was finally starting to adult. She was so excited. She would adult the best, she was a natural at adulting, everyone would see.

Suddenly the anticipated nostalgia gave her a rest and she felt a burst of energy and will to pack her books. They were the thing she missed the most, even though she would always carry up to ten books at any given time (by now her colleagues knew better than to offer her help when she was struggling with her bags). It was so heartbreaking to come home to empty shelves in a random shared hotel room. She often caught herself wishing to skip through this or that particular book, to read some passages again, or even to re-read the whole thing, and in those moments she would miss her Stars Hollow room more than ever.

Well, almost ever. She checked the clock, anxious for her mom to come home. Finally, she decided she could begin the packing while waiting for her.

She filled a big-ass box before she remembered it would be impossible to lift if it was filled exclusively with books. She got half of them out, threw some clothes in, unfolded a new box and began to rearrange that half. She could never go very far, though, before getting distracted opening the books at random pages and sighting at the wish to read some of them again. She forced herself to continue her work: there went her Stephen Kings, a couple Lovecrafts, one Vonnegut, some Dickinson, both Fitzgeralds and a single shameful Dan Brown. And then she boxed a book that gave her pause. The back cover looked familiar.

She un-boxed it: _Crónica de una muerte anunciada_. Well, she sure never read it, her Spanish was not that good. But she never owned a book she had never read, that would be nonsensical. She turned it on its side: Gabriel García Márquez.

Oh! She connected the dots: it was _Chronicle of a Death Foretold_. She had that book on her TBR List forever, and finally got around to reading it during her junior year at Yale. Still, she did not recall having a copy in Spanish… She skipped through it absentmindedly, and found a page where someone had written in ink. It was a small list:

 _Home_

 _Bridge_

 _Booze_

 _Her_

She stared at that page, at that sharp handwriting. It was angry and written with more strength than strictly necessary. The bullet points almost teared the paper and each word was crossed like items on a shopping list, the shadow of that crossing over the whole word. Except for the last one - that one was left to itself.

Jess, she thought. This is Jess' book.

She hadn't thought about him in forever. When did she last see him? Longer than forever. Was it when she visited him in Philly? She closed the book shut, feeling self-conscious at that memory, as if Jess could see her through his surprise words. That memory? Uncomfortable as hell. She wished she could take back all she did in that fateful year, so maybe they could have talked as friends when they met, instead of having every interaction clouded by the mess her life was at that point. He was always nice to talk to, she wished she had kept his friendship through those years. She knew so little about his life, and he knew even less about hers. Jess…

She heard it when Lorelai kicked the front door open.

"Hon, I'm home! Brought food!"

"About damn time!"

Rory got up to meet her mom. Before she forgot all about the book, though, she opened it again and realized that, near that little list, Jess had underlined a sentence - again with anger, but also with less strength, as if he had grown tired while pushing the pen:

 _Era como estar despierto dos veces._

\- x -

Lorelai had fallen asleep in the couch during their second run-through of Desperately Seeking Susan. Right now, Cigarette Girl was screaming:

 _"_ _My God, we thought you were dead!"_

And Susan was calmly reassuring her that no, she was just in New Jersey. "I know the feeling, sister", Rory said to the screen. The New Jersey primary was full of mixed feelings, since Hilary Clinton had won that one and her teenage loyalties had painfully surfaced.

She got up and sought a blanket to cover Lorelai. _That's OK_ , Rory thought. They were not so young anymore, maybe their glory days of instant repeat-binge were behind them. Also, her mom had woken up freakishly early (for her standards) and it was best to save their energies for the busy Stars Hollow tour they had planned for the next day.

Still. It was early, there was movement in the town square – the nocturnal plotting of the Fourth of July Festival. She felt very awake, and she knew she would probably regret that long nap when she and her mom were running around the Festival tomorrow, trying to hit all the firework launching spots before midnight. But still. She went out.

Stars Hollow felt so out of place during summer, it was nice. A hot night. It made her feel restless. She had that summer night feeling that something big was about to happen.

As she made her way to the square she could swear she heard that maddening L _azy Hazy Crazy Days of Summer"_ tune play softly in the background, but it was probably just self-suggestion.

She finally got there, and that was when she saw a familiar piece of crap car parked in the corner of Luke's. Jess. It was Jess! Rory felt a wave of affection, remembering the notes his teenage self had left on that book. She looked around, deciding to go ask for him, wanting to tell him what she had been doing. It was nice that the universe had pushed him into her mind again, after over a year. Two years?

She took a step forward, imagining how nice it would be that she would be the one to show up unannounced in his doorstep for once. Well, that is what she did the last time, but you know. This time she was less confused, her heart was cleaner, they could catch up.

Before she could take another step, tough, she saw his familiar figure against the diner's lights. He was coming down the steps with Luke. They shared an affectionate hug and exchanged words she did not hear, then Luke went back in and the lights were out.

Jess stopped on the steps to shove a book inside his bag, the same bag he had forever ago. His hair still looked messy and his eyes probably still looked dark. She walked towards him and stopped across the street when he finally felt her gaze and looked up. By then he had already reached his car.

He had that crooked smile on his face when he said "hello, Rory". She smiled back.

Then he nodded and got in the car. As he drove away, Rory felt that nostalgic urge to punch him in the face.

She turned around, unsure if she felt frustrated or if it was actually some kind of satisfying conclusion for the short story she was writing herself in her head. When she got home, she stuffed some more books in that box, sealed it, and pushed it to the living room corner before going to sleep.


	2. Sleepwalking Land, aka Home

Rory woke up and realized she was slightly late. She chose some professional-looking attire while waiting for the damn shower to heat; after a hazy, way too quick shower, she put on the outfit, deciding she would go with flats. _A little compromise is ok,_ was her line of thought, _but if they want me to walk around Chicago on heels, they better at least offer me dental._ All set, she glanced at her tiny kitchen counter, doing complex math in her head: there probably wasn't enough time to have her first fix of coffee. She would make do with only her usual second, at the coffee shop down the corner. Not a terrible loss, anyway; her coffee-making skills were always mediocre and her actual coffee-maker, well, to call it mediocre would be flattering.

She put some papers in order, put on her make-up, got her press card, checked the windows and left, still rearranging documents in files as she made her way downstairs.

By the time she got to her coffee place, she had already dropped maximum-importance papers - twice. Lucky she had not crossed any streets yet. Did she retrieve them all, though? "Well, who even cares" she thought, while standing in line and checking her bag again despite her best efforts in rationalization. _It is not as if they were actually going to check. They will have someone way, way down the food chain do it, and that usually means me, so I will just tell them it is all good and set and then I'll just let it explode in the DC team's hands. Good plan._

Her mind was somewhere else, she felt exceptionally restless. The election was little more than a month away… but that wasn't it. Today there was something else going on, a thin veil of expectation. Or maybe it was just that calm fall weather, still so warm even though it was practically October already. Chicago could be so unnerving. Rory began to lose herself in thoughts of fall in Stars Hollow ( _now that is some Fall right there_ ); she would soon realize she had been facing the distressed cashier for a while now.

"Oh I'm so sorry!" She blurted her order and looked for her wallet, all while dangerously balancing the files and papers - that was the highly unstable state of her affairs when her cellphone buzzed. She reached for it with a busy hand; it was a text. She was going to pay when she finally read it, and what she read made her drop coins all over the counter.

"EXCUSE ME?!" she nearly yelled, very surprised and a little angry. The shop suddenly fell in complete silence, except for the sound of quarters spinning on wood. Rory's cheeks burned so much she was afraid her hair might catch on fire; she dropped all her junk and, while catching the coins, she would look again and again at the little screen. The text was an innocent enough invitation for coffee, saying it had to be today and it had to be soon. She did not recognize the number, but in the short, contained invitation she did recognize Jess.

\- x -

Rory sat by the window in the hallway, which was also her office. She kept toying with the cellphone in her hands, playing hockey with it on her desk. It would be easier if her desk wasn't so crowded, but she did it anyway. Jess. Why does he keep doing that, showing up like that? It is like some kind of bad habit.

She said yes, though. She told him he had to drop by her work and that she only had a couple of minutes for a break. He said he would be there on time and she decided to hold him for that. It was not like she could get any work done this morning, anyway.

She looked up and down the street. It never crossed her mind to blow the invitation; she was too curious. But she did feel a little foolish, waiting for him, expecting to have a normal social interaction when she could very well predict that would not be the case.

She looked again and there he was, standing across the street from her office. She took the elevator and prepared herself to the awkwardness of seeing Jess like this, so far away from any familiar setting, from any grounding references.

"Hello, Rory," he greeted her in his same old detached manner. Yes, she could tell this time, his eyes definitely still looked dark.

"Jess," she said, still sounding surprised. "What are you doing here?"

"I have a matter of pressing importance to discuss with you," he said, looking at her up and down. "I can't believe you are working on a Saturday. Or is the pantsuit just kinda your thing now?"

"OK, if you are going to open your number by mocking the mandatory costume for my job," Rory began, half joking, half actually annoyed, "I am going to have to reschedule. My assistant will get in touch. She has an even better pantsuit game, you'll see."

"You know that is not what I mean," Jess said defensively. "I actually think it suits you."

That gave Rory pause. "Oh, thanks. Then please explain this fateful encounter of ours."

He smiled. "It _is_ fateful, isn't it? If you put a Schopenhauerian spin on the fate part."

"If you don't tell me soon what you are doing here, I'll show you where you can shove the Schopenhauerian spin."

"Oh, stern face! I guess I'd better hurry." She gave him the most annoyed of looks, and he laughed. "Let's go for coffee. Do you have a usual place?"

"Why do you keep making these dumb questions, Jess?" She started walking, showing him the way. "You think I would just give up having a regular coffee dealer? What kind of monster do you think I've become?"

"I don't know, Gilmore," he answered, smiling and walking after her, his shoulders a little hunched. "You are still to fill me in. All I can safely assume is that you are now in the big league."

"I am so not in the big league! And even if I was, you should know no league is big enough for me if I can't fit industrial amounts of coffee in it." She laughed lightly, as they made the bell ring in her favorite coffee place.

\- x -

"So," Rory said when they were finally seated, "what brought you here was pure _Wille zum Leben_? No other reason?"

"You know how it goes. Man can indeed do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wants."

"You do know that is not Schopenhauer, right?"

"It's not?"

"It's Einstein paraphrasing Schopenhauer," she laughed.

"Oh damn," he laughed along. " _'The world is my representation'_ is still him though, right?"

"I guess?"

"OK, great. I don't like my paraphrasing so early in the morning."

"It is not that early, but it _is_ before noon, which only adds to my puzzlement at your presence here in front of me."

"Right." He sat straight. "I am going to just cut to the chase, I know you Gilmores eat fast."

"True," she smiled. And waited.

He searched for something in his washed up backpack. Finally he dove out with two little pieces of paper: tickets for the My Bloody Valentine concert on the Aragon Ballroom.

"After ten years, can you believe it? Ten years!" Jess handed her the tickets, his tone unprecedentedly joyful. "I don't know what great deed have I done that made me deserve this reunion. I never thought I would get the chance to see them live, but then I got the tickets yesterday, it was dumb luck, some guy that came by Truncheon. And I had to come."

Rory was examining the tickets. She had the biggest smile. "Jess, no way! They just began their US tour, these tickets are impossible to get right now!"

"I know, I still can't believe it." Even when he smiled with sincerity, it was a crooked smile. "They have done just, what, three shows in New York so far, and I couldn't get tickets to any of them."

Rory looked up. "So, you came here just to rub these on my face?"

He laughed. "Of course not, Rory, I came here so you would come with me."

"Come with you?"

"Yes."

"To the concert?"

"That would be the point, yes."

"To the concert that is tonight?"

"Good sense of chronological orientation."

"But tonight, I mean, tonight?"

"Yea, Rory!"

She frowned. "Aw man, I have an early flight, like, first thing tomorrow."

"Where you going?"

She sighted and zipped her coffee. "Missouri."

"Missouri?" he repeated with humorous disbelief. "What on Earth are you doing in Missouri?"

"The vice-presidential debate is next Thursday, I am covering it."

"Impressive." He lit up a little, and she thought it was cute. "Do you have to be there so early, though?"

"There are all kinds of hype around it, ok? I mean, Joe Biden is, whatever, but Sarah Palin? Super entertaining."

"No argument there." he remembered to take a bite of his donut and dropped jelly in the process. "But come on! I'll get you on the plane, I promise. Even if you are a little drunk. I would actually advise that you get a little drunk, it would probably help you prepare for the amount of Palin you are gonna have to take in. You know, get a little dead inside."

Rory laughed. "God, Jess…"

"I know," he interrupted her, looking around, out the window. "I know I should have called first or something. It is just… I wasn't even sure I was going to ask you. But, you know…"

He shrugged, and then he looked back at her face.

"It is right here, where you live. And it's just… There is no one else I would like to go with."

She returned his look while finishing her coffee, not sure about what he meant. Before she could fish for more clues, though, he was getting up.

"So, come on. I will let you sit on this, but remember, the clock is ticking." She got up too and they made their way out. "But please say yes. Live a little, Rory."

"OK," she said as they parted ways, "I will think about it. Maybe make some arrangements. We'll see. I am not promising anything."

"No promise needed," Jess was saying as he waked away."Something tells me you will pull the _Wille_ and the _Leben_ and I'll see you there."

"We'll see!", Rory yelled laughing, as he disappeared around the corner.

\- x -

The mirror she had on the bathroom was the littlest of mirrors. She could see her forehead, she could see her chin, but not both at once. It really did not help her see the whole picture. So she kept putting her hair up and down, trying to make up her mind, poorly assisted by the tiny mirror.

Weird, she thought. Her hair down made her feel more exposed, not more protected. Why is that? Most people would rather have something to hind behind when things got awkward. That is the whole reason the emocore hairstyle was ever a thing.

Plus, her bangs were too long now, she looked like Wednesday Addams. _I guess that's cool if I can pull it off_ , she thought, pressing a little perfume behind her ears. Sigh. She sat on the bed, looking at her shoes, unsure of how to feel. If a person can't even choose a feeling, how can they choose shoes? Jesus.

She heard her cellphone ring but walked to the window instead of answering it. Jess was calling her from across the street. His hair was as messy as ever but now that she thought about it, it had always been away from his face. Maybe he had a Wednesday Addams thing going on, maybe he would always show his face because he was always proudly confronting people. Maybe it worked for him.

She decided to go with the boots; they were pretty but comfortable. Yes, they would work in any circumstance; the boots were open to whatever. But as she left the apartment she gave the tiny mirror another look and, climbing down the squeaky stairs, she absentmindedly pinned her hair up.

\- x -

"Ok, I am in your hood now, so I didn't even look for directions."

"You don't seem to remember I come from a town that literally has just one block".

"Gee, thanks for reassuring me!"

"Don't worry, I am pretty sure it is just next to the Argyle station. Easy breezy."

"Oh sure. No pressure or anything. If we get lost and miss this concert, we can catch the next reunion, this stuff happens all the time. We'll meet at Fugazi or The Smiths or maybe at the Hell Freezes Over Festival."

"Relax, I'll get us there!" Rory laughed, but then she had a thought. She stopped walking and stepped in front of Jess, facing him. "Actually…"

"What?" he asked, sounding alarmed. "I thought you were kidding. Weren't you kidding? I know _I_ was kidding."

"Would you have a little faith in me, please? I was just gonna say, maybe we could go by foot instead. It is not that far, we could grab a beer somewhere and walk alongside Lake Michigan."

"Really?" he raised his eyebrows.

"Yea, it is so nice this time of the year. I have noticed that it is really colder around the Lake during spring, but so far this fall it has been kind of warmer in the shore than in the city. I wonder if that is a thing? You can ask me again at the Hell Freezes Over Palooza, by then I will not be such an out-of-towner anymore."

"Looks like you've got all the important parts down already. That is, if you know where to get us some beer."

"Yea sure, there are plenty of little bars by the lake. Let's go, then? Can't wait for all that catching up to begin." She said that knowingly, and Jess gave her the crookest of smiles.

Twenty minutes later, they had already found a seedy little bar to grab some bottles and were on their way, walking by the lake with no rush.

"I supposed there _is_ a lot of catching up to do," Jess began. "For starters, when did you become a beer person?"

She laughed. "I guess I am not a beer person, exactly, but the night called for it."

"Agreed. What about being a Chicago person?"

"Weird, right? I probably won't stay around for long, it depends so much on what will happen in the election. But I kind of like it, though. It is nice having a more consequential job, in the campaign headquarters. Back in the primaries I was basically a scandal insurance."

Jess almost spit his beer laughing. "Is that a thing?"

"Well, I guess I just made up the name, but yes, it is totally a thing. I would cover all the little rallies and speeches, those that are not worth a seasoned reporter's time. You always need somebody on the spot, in case some lunatic in the crowd shoots the candidate or something, even if chances are it will just be a big ol' baby-kissing snoozefest."

"Did you have any luck? Catch any big ol' brain-splattering murderfest?"

"No, none of those." She laughed. "It was still fun, though, living on the road for a while."

"It sounds fun, and honestly a little hard to believe."

"Hey!"

"Not that you don't have it in you, but you know. You still have that Stars Hollow glow all over you and it is not the most Kerouacian of glows."

"I know, I know. I am more of a Sal Paradise than a Dean Moriarty."

"But hey, Sal still managed to do a little damage, you know, even if every now and then he missed home oh so terribly."

"Yea, right? It was fun. I have always had stability, family, a boyfriend, a fixed schedule on my mind. It was nice to let go of those cornerstones for a while."

There was a beat of silence before Jess asked, "but what about that guy? What was his name again... Blondie McDoucheface?"

"Oh" Rory paused at the thought of Logan. _What is he doing now?_ She could easily know, if she wanted, but she felt right now it was best to leave it to speculation. "Hm. He and I broke up right after my graduation. He… wanted more than I could give at that point."

There was a longer silence, while Jess looked at her from the corner of his eyes.

"You miss him?"

"… yea." Rory realized she was saying it out loud for the first time since she gave back the ring. "It was easy not to think about it for a while. But now I have my own place again and I keep thinking about how he is not there."

He looked at her more directly. "Sorry I called him Blondie McDoucheface."

She laughed through her nose. "That's ok."

"So", Jess continued, drinking his beer. "What about your new place?"

"Oh, it is a dump. But it is well situated, so you know. And I can afford it, which is awesome."

"Come on, it looked nice from the sidewalk."

"Believe me, the sidewalk is the best part of it. It is so small, and the electric system sucks. But the last place I had in Yale, with Paris, was also a dump, and since this one has no Paris it is already an improvement."

She zipped her beer, and suddenly felt self-conscious and compelled to add a disclaimer: "I don't want to _brag_ about it being a dump, don't get the wrong idea... It is just that it is important to me that I at least try to live on my own money. I don't want to feel like I am just playing house, you know? I sure have done that before, and it kind of stinks." She frowned a little while thinking about it. "But it is not like I don't have all kinds of support. It is not at all like what you went through, for instance."

Jess shrugged in that way that was so his own. "I did have support by the time I left to California. I guess I was just too stubborn to take it."

"Wow", Rory exclaimed, stopping in the sidewalk, feeling amazed.

"What?" Jess asked with a husky voice.

"Nothing," she answered, smiling, as she resumed walking. "It is just that I had never realized how alike are you and my mother."

He gave her a little push, outraged, and she laughed soundly as they arrived at the Aragon Ballroom.

\- x -

They were standing a little far from the stage. Jess had insisted that was the acoustic sweetspot; Rory was satisfied, mainly because she was not being squeezed from a hundred different directions. They were also really close to the beer stand, which was certainly a plus. She was already on her fifth beer or so, and she was starting to feel that lovely tingling on the extremities of her body.

"Do you think they will play _Sometimes_?" she asked, leaning in his direction so he could hear her.

"They'd better", he answered. "Probably it will be the last one on the setlist. Go out with a bang and all that."

"And how badly do I want to be Bilinda?" she sighed as the guitarist went on a lowkey solo.

"Not more badly than I do," he smiled, having some of his beer.

Rory looked at him, standing next to her, his face lit softly under the red light. All that alcohol made her feel bold.

"You know, we only talked about me on the way here."

He looked back at her, smiling slightly but ever crookedly. "You are way more interesting than I am, Doogie."

"Yea right," she snorted. "But I actually had something I've been meaning to ask you."

He raised his eyebrows; she had caught his attention. "Is that so?"

"That is so." She answered triumphantly. "Back in the Summer I found a book of yours in my room. I didn't know you could read Spanish!"

He made that shrug of his. "You grow up in New York, you learn some Spanish if you're not deaf."

"Huh. You sure have a lot of hidden talents," she said, feeling jealous. "The thing is, there was a little list on the margins, right next to a underlined sentence. I remember it, it was like –" she coughed dramatically and recited it, over-pronouncing every word. This time Jess did spit some of his beer when he laughed.

"God, Rory, your Spanish sucks. It sounds so damn white."

"Oh, bite me," she laughed along. "But I kept wondering what it meant. And what the list meant. It was nearly completely crossed. And it went like-"

He interrupted her, looking at the stage again. "I think I remember it. Vaguely. I do wonder how my book ended up in your room though."

"I think Luke brought it . He has been slowly moving his stuff to our house. You know Luke, he is not big on change."

"Yep, that is Luke."

She stared at him interrogatively. "So?"

"So what?"

"What did it mean?"

"I'm not telling you!"

"Come on, Jess!" She pulled the sleeve of his jacket. "I need to know. Come on."

He looked back at her and his smile made even sharper angles. "I'll tell you what. If you can guess what each item on the list stands for, I will tell you why it's there and why I crossed it."

"Not fair!"

"OK, give up, then. But I have to say, I thought the journalist in you would have followed that lead until the bitter end." He pushed her lightly with his shoulder. "Not that it leads to anything interesting, but God knows why you were interested in the first place."

"Fine, I'll accept your ridiculous terms," she agreed, intrigued. "But you have to give me some kind of clue."

"I will." He said, and then noticing the disbelief in her face: "I will! I promise."

"I couldn't believe you less. You, _mystery man_."

"Yep, that is me." He nodded, looking at the stage again.

Rory, however, kept looking at him, standing there under that reddish light. He seemed to keep a loose grasp on the shaving habit; it suited him, though. His eyes were so big and so dark, they were always about to betray him whenever he pulled his monosyllabic game. He had a denim jacket on and it was probably the same one he had the last time he showed up at her door. He had changed so much, and also not at all.

She kept silent, feeling the music vibrating on her throat; Jess bought more beer for her once, she bought more beer for him once. Finally, the band played _Sometimes_ , and that was when Rory looked at him again.

 _Close my eyes, feel me now_  
 _I don't know how you could not love me now_

"Jess?" she asked. Or the seventh beer asked, she was not so sure. "Why are you like this?"

He looked at her and she realized she had caught him off guard. "Excuse me?"

"Like this. Always showing up when I don't expect it. Always leaving when I don't want you to."

"Oh. That is an easy one." He looked down at his shoes.

"We could have catched up a couple months ago in Stars Hollow, but you just took off. It is like you refuse to just sit down and talk like humans, but then you have to show up out of the blue, to bring me here, to - "

"It's lucky this is a shoegaze concert, because I'm never looking up from my shoes again."

"Come on, Jess? This, right now, could have been so easy."

"I don't know, Rory. I just…"

"You just what?"

He looked up at her. His eyes looked darker than ever.

"You are you. I guess I never learned how to show up empty-handed at your doorstep."

And that, right there, was when she kissed him.

 _Close my eyes, feel me now_  
 _I don't know, maybe you could not hurt me now._

\- x -

He took her home the same way they came, walking by the lake, feeling the slightly warmer breeze. This time, however, they were silent. When they finally arrived at her door, Jess looked on his backpack and pulled something out: a book.

"Here's your clue,", he said, with the subtler of smiles, full of soft edges. "It is also a good book, if you mind reading it."

"She look at the cver: _Sleepwalking Land_ , Mia Couto. "Oh, I have been meaning to read something by him."

"It took forever for someone to translate him here. This one has a bit of magical realism too, so it should help, you know... follow that lead."

She smiled, reaching for the book. "Thanks, Jess."

He raised his arm, though, taking it out of her reach. "Hey, you think that is how it works?"

As she looked confused, he continued: "I know you too well, I need a hostage. Plus, I've been looking for something to read next."

She looked at him again. His face was now lit in that yellowish street light. She did not seem to have too many words left, so she kept looking at his face, thinking less and less; she was mildly drunk and also beginning to feel like no time had passed at all.

"Come on, Rory, don't be so cheap!" She felt the alcohol in his breath; he too was a little drunk, but he looked nervous nonetheless. "Just give me whatever you are reading now."

"Sure," she said softly, taking his hand, ignoring his shock, reaching for her keys. She felt him shiver ever so slightly with anticipation as they climbed the squeaky stairs.

When they were finally inside, she closed the door and looked at him once again. She never turned on the lights; his face was now lit blue, his eyes looked watery and distressed. Then she kissed him, and it was like their last kiss, and also like their first kiss: he closed his eyes before he could even realize he was being kissed, and when he did realize it he reached for her, pulled her close, held her face like he had been waiting for this for so long. She had no sense of direction or any idea of what she was doing, but the longer they kissed, the hungrier he grew, the more decided, like there was, indeed, a direction they were supposed to go down all along.

He had his hands on her back and she touched his hair, his neck, his chest. She was slowly pulling him towards the bed, not sure she had ever planned for this. Then, as if he was taking the orders she never gave, he turned her around and threw her in the bed, kissing her neck, unzipping her dress. She grabbed the edges of the bed when he touched her, hoarse sounds coming out of her throat, feeling as if the music was vibrating on her again. She turned around and slid him out of his shirt, running her hands through his arms with a weird, electric charge, searching in the dark for his belt. All she would be able to remember later was the way she had bit his neck to keep from screaming, as he fucked her harder than in every dream she'd ever had about this moment - and the way he would slowly, softly collapse, his mouth still in her ear, still calling for her. They would later fall asleep, closer than they had ever been, his head on her stomach and her hands on his hair. That lovely tingling she felt in the ballroom had never left, though she suspected she was the one who had invited it to stay.

\- x -

"Jess," she called him, shaking him softly. The golden, early morning light made everything feel suspended. "It is New York, isn't it?"

He woke up, looking adorably confused to see her up and dressed. "Where you going?"

"I have that flight to catch. No, don't get up! You look kind of cute lying there all sleepy."

He still had the ability to blush, she noted as he let himself fall back against the pillows. "But come on, tell me. I got it right, didn't I? _Home_ on the list is New York."

"How did you know?"

"I was reading the book while having coffee. _'I looked at myself and, light as I was, not carrying any luggage, I remembered my father's words: those who have no friends are those who travel with no load._ '"

"You guessed from just that? You are too good, Gilmore."

"I know, right? Now tell me. What does it mean? Why did you cross it?"

"I'm not telling you now!" he said, sleepy and grumpy, closing his eyes.

"But you promised!"

"I am pretty sure the current power unbalance puts that promise on hold. I _am_ naked in your bed, and in case you didn't notice, you are fully dressed and leaving me for another state."

"But I need to know! It is going to drive me crazy."

"Something to distract you through the Sarah Palin madness."

"Jess!"

He turned around, facing her but unable to keep his eyes open. "I'll tell you _when_ I crossed it. Take it or leave it."

"OK," she agreed, even grumpier, getting up and picking up her bags. "Here is your book, by the way, don't forget to take it with you. It is your hostage, after all." She left the slim Virginia Woolf next to him on the bed and he took it with a grunt, too sleepy to even read the title. "The keys are on the kitchen counter. Sorry there is no food, though you are probably not surprised. Please tell me the answer now so I can catch that plane with any resemblance of peace."

He was on the edge of falling back asleep when he finally answered: "I crossed it when I chose to move back to Stars Hollow. To come back to you."

She felt bewildered by his sleepy sincerity and said nothing. Later that morning, inside the plane, she reached the part of the book where Juliana Bastiana, the blind prostitute, says to the hero of the story within the story:

 _"Is there a reason of love?"_

 _"Yes, there is."_

 _"Then there is nothing else I need to know."_


	3. A Room of One's Own, aka Bridge

When Election Day finally came, Rory was so exhausted she couldn't even feel excitement for the victory – all she felt was general relief that crazy month was over. Her boss felt all the excitement for her, though. Before the vote count was over, she called some selected reporters and invited them for the victory party. Not _a_ victory party, _the_ victory party – the senator had built his career in Chicago, after all. Rory was supposed to feel honored, and yet, all she felt was longing for her bed and a _Happy Days_ marathon.

She was putting her earrings on when one of her friends, a photographer at the magazine, pulled over by her door to take her to the party. As she slipped into her heels and made her way out, she briefly looked back to her bed and thought of her last sight of Jess, from that exact angle. She had waited for him to call, she had contemplated calling him a few times, but the last month was just so crazy, so crowded. She couldn't even hear her own, pre-existing thoughts most of the time, let alone stop and make up entirely new, Jess-related ones.

Besides, suppose she did call him. What was there to say? She honestly didn't know.

She let it slip again to the back of her mind the moment she stepped into Grant Park. She would watch some history happen and, weirdly, she felt like part of it. She and her friend were awarded good enough press seats, but when the speech was about to begin, the photographer was off to photograph. Rory sat there by herself, taking notes, yawning a bit, slowly allowing the excitement to creep in - but then her stomach sank when she saw a familiar figure in the distance.

 _Is that Mitchum?,_ she thought, wishing to be wrong. He went by, dangerously close to her seat, before disappearing into an important-looking, restricted-access area. Oh, of course, he is a big-ass donor for the Party. She should have known that.

She looked up the stage, taking in that small blow of the past, when a full-on sucker-punch came her way:

"I was expecting to see you here, Ace," Logan said as he took the empty seat next to her.

\- x -

The city had a coat of light snow. Rory lost a moment looking out the window, her thoughts far away, her coffee getting cold. She contemplated the possibility of going to Columbia Island, to sit on a bench and read a little – yes, even with this chili weather. Next to Stars Hollow, Washington was a literal walk in the park in terms of cold. This was her first actual lazy Sunday since the election. Lately, when she was not sitting at her desk, buried in paper, or running around the Capitol like a crazy person, she was taking a flight to see Logan. It was weird, trying to find holes in their crazy schedules, sometimes spending no more than a few hours together. At times, it was great, it felt just like before; other times, it felt like they were creating a little bubble, desperately trying to avoid the heavy questions that were always weighting the room. _What are we even doing? What is this? What are we? Remember when you proposed to me? That was crazy, right?_ \- those would be the first ones.

But today even that was a matter in recession; the break would be absolute. She wanted to go out and watch the snow.

After having the laziest cup of coffee ever, she finally left her cozy blankets, turned off the _Brady Brunch_ marathon, got dressed and went out. She found a café near the park and ordered some hot chocolate and pancakes. Her first month in yet another city. This adult life thing was taking the weirdest turns.

When her children's-menu late breakfast arrived, she felt such a strong wave of homesickness she was afraid she might burst into tears. She dropped her book and did the only rational thing to do: call her mom.

"Oh hi hon!" Lorelai sounded as bubbly as ever. "I wasn't expecting to hear from you until later. Though you were taking a day off from general existence."

"I was. I am!" Rory said defensively. "I was just thinking about my mother, am I not allowed to do that anymore? Maybe I'll start a club with Carrie Fisher."

"Oh you should, you girls can exchange notes on your mothers' _Let It Snow_ singing performances. I know I would kick Debbie Reynold's ass. Incidentally, I could bet you just called because it snowed over there."

"How could you possibly know that?!"

"Ha" Rory just knew Lorelai was smirking. "I smelled it."

"Bull."

"It is not!"

"You can't possibly smell snow across five-ish states!"

"Rory, dear, I was put on this Earth to bring two gifts to the human kind. One of them is my snow-smelling freak ability; the other one was supposed to be you, but I am starting to second-guess that."

"Just admit you saw the weather forecast or something."

"I did not! In fact, I can prove it. Luke and I have just arrived from Philly and of course Jess and his hipsters friends don't have a TV in their place. Search your feelings, you know it to be true."

Lorelai kept talking; Rory, however, felt like she had hit a wall. "Oh," she said, fighting the dizziness. "What were you guys doing down there?"

"Visiting. Having late Christmas."

"Mom. It is almost February."

"Yea, but you know. Between Luke being grumpy and Jess being Jess, it is hard for them to have some non-awkward family time. I kind of made up the Christmas thing to give Luke an excuse to show up. He needed one so badly, he was dying to meet his girlfriend."

Rory felt she had physically been taken aback by the shock this time. She checked her neck for whiplash. "Girlfriend?"

"Yea hon. You didn't know?" Lorelai changed her tone; maybe she noticed something different. "I thought you younglings had your ways of knowing that stuff."

"No… No, I didn't know." Rory stuffed her mouth with pancakes, feeling she needed to put it to some use other than being open in shock. "We talked a few months ago, but mainly about books and stuff."

"Oh, his press thing is doing great, they are talking about expanding it or something. Plus it is always full during functions. Mainly full of those hipstery types that you kind of want to punch in the face but can't really put a pin on why."

"Oh yes, I so know what you mean." She could punch one of them right now, actually. "But so… how is she like?"

"Who?"

"Mom! The girlfriend."

"Oh, she is nice." Lorelai sounded measured. "Pretty. Artsy. Vegan – what a shock, right?"

"She's vegan?"

"Yes, imagine that! She and Luke really bonded over cooking and healthiness and general Euell Gibbons gibberish. They actually made the supper. I didn't even know you could have so many different soy-based types of food in one single meal."

"Oh god."

" _I know_. It went well, though. Jess and I almost dislocated our retinas from all the eye-rolling, but it was loving eye-rolling, mostly. And Luke just adores her. He talked the whole way back about how grounded Jess seems now."

"Oh well, that is great." She felt she should add more words, but there weren't any around.

"In fact, he gave me something."

"He did?"

"Said to deliver it to you when I got the chance."

"He did?!"

"Yes he did."

"Oh my god, mom, what is it with you today that you are just holding back on all of the juicy stuff?"

"I don't know, I thought you were not interested in gossip anymore, now that you are a big fancy political correspondent."

"Mom! Political corresponding is just one big fat exercise in gossip. Do I have to teach you everything? Tell me what it is!"

"I don't know, it is in a package. But since I am learning so much from you today I just might open it and you can catch the full report on CNN."

"Don't do that!" Rory paused. "Maybe just shake it a bit?"

"It is not a shakey kind of thing. It is more like a bookey kind of thing."

"Oh. Ok," Rory said, thinking back, searching for some clue of what it could be. "When it arrives I'll tell you immediately what it is."

"What do you mean, 'when it arrives'?"

"Well, aren't you mailing it to me or something?"

"Do you kids think I am some kind of UPS? Because I am deeply offended. I know better than to mix yellow and brown."

"What, you think I should wait six months to see what it is? That is so not the way I was raised to go through life."

"Six months?! You won't come home for another six months?!"

"I told you, it is crazy here! Plus I am still getting the hang of the freelancer thing. I want to keep my non-dump of an apartment, thank you very much."

"But it is so unfair!"

"You are the child in this relationship, you know that, right?"

"All these years and you still sound mildly surprised."

"I am sure you will beat it out of me eventually. In the meantime, just send me the damn package, and we will discuss a date for you to come down here."

"But mom!" Lorelai cried in a baby voice.

"Oh jesus," Rory laughed. There was a little silence before Lorelai asked, a hint of suspicion in her voice:

"So how are things with Logan?"

Rory felt so many different things all tangled at once; at this point she couldn't even tell where Logan ended and Jess began.

"Same. Still good, still weird."

"You'll figure it out, hon."

"Thanks." She said, and she meant it, although she wondered what words was Lorelai refraining from saying. She wouldn't give her the taste of having her ask, though; she knew her mother too well. "So, about those plane tickets we are getting you…"

"I will have to get back to you on that, honey. The reception is bad, the house is going through a tunnel."

"You know you'll have to come visit me for a change, if we are to see each other more than twice a year."

"But, but…" Lorelai fake-stuttered.

"Dear god, you and Luke are just like those hermits from _Monty Phyton_. "

"Ok, I'll get the calendar and we'll choose the next slow week at the Inn."

"If you hang up I am going to kill you, you know that, right?" Rory laughed, missing home even more than when she dialed its number. One more thread to sort in this mess, she thought as she waited by the silent line.

\- x -

A month passed before Lorelai would send the damn package. During that whole month, Rory had not met Logan at all; their schedules simply would not allow it. She was in the weirdest of headspaces, working too much and surviving solely on take-out, barely having the time to read a book. Before the package arrived, she had kept her mind meticulously away from it. Even the thought of it had her burning with curiosity, and there was only so much she could take before developing gastritis or calling Lorelai to ask – and that she could not do, because the risk was too high that Lorelai would see right through it, and then what? How would she explain what was going on if she couldn't even explain it to herself? In fact – she realized – there was nothing going on, nothing to explain. Jess had a girlfriend, god knows how _that_ happened, and that was it.

But in the short amount of time she took to unwrap his careful package, it all came to her. The way he would show up and just bring havoc into her life. The numerous ways the light hit his face, the way his hand was shaking when she guided him upstairs, the way his eyes looked dark and distressed when she kissed him. The way he fucked her, so hard and so desperate, taking in so much of her; the way he looked sound asleep in her bed when she left for the airport, in the most improbable composition, his skin looking so olive against her sheets.

She had not thought too much about it in those few months; ever since their last phone call, when they were still just kids, she had learned to push him into non-existence in her mind every time that radio silence prevailed between the two of them. When Logan was in her life everything fell into place; he would just cut through all the bullshit and state what was going on, what he felt, what she felt. With Jess, she couldn't even begin to fathom. It made so much more sense to keep him in that sterilized little corner of her heart.

Still. She would hear his name and all of it would hit her in waves of unrestlessness . It was not fair and it was not coherent and still there she was, undoing the book-shaped package he had done, feeling anxious and sick.

It was a book but also not quite a book.

She looked closer: there was no cover and the paper was bound delicately, like it was done by hand. So it was a book of sorts. It had no cover, but it did have a sticky note:

 _For fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners._

 _Don't judge the title too harshly, it is not definitive yet._

She recognized the Virginia Woolf quote: it was _A Room of One's Own_ , the book she had given him and he had sleepily taken, still in her bed. Then she looked at the top page and saw the words in capital letters: MADE FOR DEFEAT. And under those words there was his name.

Oh, she realized. This is a manuscript.

\- x -

Summer in D.C was just a nightmare. All the way to Stars Hollow, that was all Rory could think about. No matter how hard she tried to keep her movements to a minimum, she would always end up soaked in sweat. She did not think it was humanly possible to move so little, and yet, she would always be craving a shower before it was even noon. Dear god. Congressional recess could not have come at a better time.

And yet, she had wasted two full weeks putting her affairs in order in that god-forsaken, boiling city, before she could finally go home. Everything was so frustrating. She just did not have that excitement, that feeling that history is happening as we speak. All of her work felt bureaucratic and soulless: she would write lame, descriptive, uninteresting pieces about lame, descriptive, uninteresting congressional hearings – when she was not going through the lame, descriptive, uninteresting labor of pitching articles and negotiating with editors, one at a time in a never-ending stream. No matter how much money was there to be made, those 15 days that were left she would spend as a perfectly unproductive member of society, happy and at home.

She had already spent one glorious week soaking in Stars Hollow madness, keeping all the familiar traditions, checking on all the familiar faces and disavowing the same crazy stories a million times ("so you really played beer-pong with the President?" "… not really, Babette"). This morning, she was reading the _Stars Hollow Gazette_ while finishing her morning coffee at Luke's. Her mind was not crowded for the first time in months, and the diner felt peaceful. But then again, maybe it was just Lorelai's absence – she had just left to check on the Inn, and Luke, as Rory, was soaking in the peace she had left behind.

"Hey Luke", she said, from her seat in the counter. "I think I am ready for my second fix now."

He gave her a fatherly, disapproving look, but still said "coming right up" with warmth.

By then, Rory had finished the paper's tiny politics section (mainly devoted to trashing neighboring city's mayors) and her eyes were floating around for a bit. Amidst all of the nostalgia that was still to stop hitting her, she spotted a book behind the counter: it was _Ms. Dalloway_. Virginia Woolf.

"Luke," she called him again. "When did Jess get here?"

"He just arrived last night," he answered, blissfully clueless. "He was in New York for some business and shockingly decided to come by."

Luke was such a softie, Rory thought to herself. He was obviously happy to have his nephew around; he was even smiling through his usual grumpiness.

"Is he sleeping?"

"No, he woke up early, said he had to work on something. I know, I couldn't believe it either."

"Where could he possibly get work done in Stars Hollow in the middle of the Summer Festival craziness?"

"Beats me" Luke was saying, taking the pot out of the coffee-maker. "But if I had to guess, I'd say he's probably…"

"… by the bridge." Rory anticipated his answer, with sudden inspiration. She paused for a bit before she said, "hey Luke? Maybe I'll take that coffee to go."

\- x -

"So, I figured out the next item on the list."

He had been lying down across the bridge, staring at what shreds of sky could be seen through the trees - outwardly ignoring whatever work there was to get done in the forgotten computer lying on his backpack. When he heard her voice he sat up and smiled in a crooked but contained way, like he had been waiting for her.

"Took you long enough." Damn, why couldn't he just admit he was surprised to see her there?

She sat down by his side. "I have always wondered why you like this place, of all places."

"What is there not to like?" was his answer. " _The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree._ "

" _There one might have sat the clock round lost in thought,_ " she complemented his quote. After a pause, she said, half-stating, half-asking, "so I see you liked the book."

"It was providential, actually," he answered, looking at her. "Thank you."

"How was it providential?" she laughed.

Jess let himself fall back into his earlier position, spilling some frustration. "I had to rewrite my whole damn book after reading it."

"How so?!" He had sparked her curiosity now.

"Well," he put his hands under his head; Rory turned on her own body so she could observe him. "She talks so much about the bad literature that comes out of a sectioned brain. A brain that can only think as a man, or as a woman. Or basically a brain that is concerned with proving itself and situating itself in a world where these things matter."

He paused before completing his thought, laughing: "I didn't want any female reader to feel like she had been _'eavesdropping at a purely masculine orgy'_ , as Ms. Woolf puts with such eloquence."

Rory's laugh resonated through the water. "You do take that risk when you are so into Hemingway."

"Hey!" He lift his head, outraged, and she laughed even harder. He was lying back once again when he asked: "So you caught that, huh?"

"I did not catch the reference, no. But I just knew it must be Hemingway."

"It's from _The Old Man and the Sea_." He clarified. "But it is not pure Hemingway. Not really, anyway."

"Oh, it's not?"

"No," he smiled; the daylight hit his face and she caught herself noticing, like she had so many years ago, that his eyes were not so dark under the sun. "I threw some Woolf in there too. To dial the male orgy down."

"How is it in the original?"

Jess closed his eyes as he said it: " _but man is not made for defeat; a man can be destroyed but not defeated._ "

Rory took that in. "Even when you decide to argue with him, your voice is so much like his. The short sentences, the straightforwardness. The larger-than-life feel. The anger, too."

He looked at her with his full-on crooked smile. "Is that even a compliment coming from you?"

"You know it is!" she said, sounding offended. "You got me into him. You said it yourself, Ernest only has lovely things to say about me. I would never be so rude as to not return the courtesy."

This time his face betrayed his surprise. Maybe he did not think it possible that she would remember the words he had said to her, in that same spot, forever ago. But she did.

"You are still to give me an honest review, though," he said, shying away from her gaze. "I am assuming, of course, you did make it through the end of that mess, which would be no small prowess."

"Oh don't give me that artist flagellation speech. Of course I did. You knew I would love it. I just…"

He looked at her with fearful anticipation. She thought it was cute. But she was still trying to convince herself not to say what she was going to say.

"Just what? Don't do this to me, Rory, say it."

She bit her lip. "I was surprised that, under all the stream of consciousness, it was a love story. An honest one, for that matter."

He smiled, looking away again. "I guess you could call it that."

"Jess," she took a deep breath, feeling she was going down a suicide mission. "Was it me?"

He looked at her, frowning because the sun still hit his face. In the moment it took him to say something, she mentally ranked all the possible ways he could possibly deny it within the English language. She was about to begin ranking the French plausible deniability options when he finally answered:

"Yes. That was you." He sighed again. "As much as it could be. It is still fiction, after all. But it was you. I'm sorry about that. I hope it doesn't make you too uncomfortable."

"No… no." She tried to articulate some kind of meaningful sentence but it was not as easy as she recalled it to be. "It was… I am not… No."

There was silence. Jess had his eyes shut; it looked like his hair was so dark it had trapped the sunlight – it barely reflected it. Rory kept toying with a leaf she found on the edge of the bridge; she had already tore it to pieces when she finally made the silly question she wanted so badly to make:

"Wasn't your girlfriend jealous?"

He did not open his eyes, but he did smile from his sleep-like state. "Not at all. She knows all about you."

Of all the possible answers, Rory didn't expect this one. "She does?"

"Yes, she does." He said calmly. "She understands it all better than I do, probably."

Rory looked at him in complete disbelief. He still did not look at her when he said:

"You left a mark, you know."

"What?"

"You bit my neck so hard you left a mark."

Her face became a complete gradient of red, all at once. She couldn't bring herself to say anything, so Jess continued.

"I couldn't even see it, it was too far back. She pointed it out to me."

"Come again?"

"It's true."

Rory was beyond embarassed now. It was a completely new kind of breathless awkwardness. She asked, "she was already around by then?"

"She has being around for a while; she says she has been waiting for me. She spotted the mark and said she would wait for it to fade. That by then I could maybe let her in. And she was right. I finally did."

Listening to him say that, Rory felt unexpectedly jealous. This is ridiculous, she thought. This makes no sense.

And yet… this woman, whoever she was, had seen through him so completely. And as for herself, there she was, like the same teenager she once were, at the very same spot, collecting little hints of his feelings and obsessing over them. Except Jess was so blunt these days. He did not squirm like his teenage self used to, back when he was in love with her and this woman didn't exist.

"How is she like?"

He sighed; his mind seemed to drift a little further away. "She is determined. And beautiful. She is also a high school drop-out, so you know we share some values. Sometimes I wake up and she is playing the guitar; she pretends she does not notice that I am listening."

"You sound in love."

"Yea," he said, and then he finally looked at her. "She actually bounded the manuscript I gave you. She is very good at it, her books look so delicate and yet they never fall apart. But she did a very lowkey job for you. She said since you are an editor you would probably want to tear it all apart to make notes anyway."

Rory could not believe it; nothing could ever have prepared her for this. She tried to keep herself together. "She did a fine job, I noticed it. Not everybody can anticipate the needs of an editor like this."

"Don't I know it."

"It is unfair, though, that she knows so much about me. I am completely in the dark here."

"You do know something about her, if you read the silly book."

"What do you mean?"

"You know, she is in there."

"From what I recall there was just one love interest. The woman on the roof."

"Well," he nodded. "She is not much of a love interest. She is more of a destination."

Rory looked at him more directly than she had until that point as she finally understood: "That was her, the shore you kept obsessing about? When you left the dock, you were going towards her?"

"It is not me, you know, it is not a memoir. It is still fiction." He smiled at her sudden discomfort. "But, yes."

Rory felt so small she could have cried. It was a weird feeling and, even more weirdly, she wanted more of that small, precise, self-inflicted torture. So she kept asking.

"How did you meet her?"

"Oh no," he dismissed her laughing, sitting up, and Rory already felt frustrated. "You don't get to skip ahead. This is a straightforward, Hemingway-ish story. You have to get to the next item on the list first."

She got a little bit of her spirit back when she asked, "so you do remember our arrangement, which means you know you owe me a clue."

"Not at all, you have already guessed it. You can't play me like this, Gilmore."

"You have to tell me why you crossed it!"

"Well," he pondered it. "I guess I can't possibly humiliate myself more. You have read my books, after all."

"If you keep saying shit like that about your books I just might start believing you."

"You should!"

"You know that is not happening," she said with sincerity. "Who are you to give an opinion anyway? Just the damn author. Now stop dodging your part in the bargain."

He emptied his lungs in a laugh that was also a sigh. "Let's see. I suppose for a moment I thought I could just... be here." He looked around, and then at her, and she surely, painfully understood what he meant. She was still sustaining his stare when he abruptly got up.

"I couldn't, though. So this bridge is more like a touristic spot now, I suppose." He dusted himself off and grabbed his stuff. "I should probably get back to the diner. I did promise Luke I would help him out today."

Rory got up with some difficulty, feeling her body a bit numb. Jess was already half-leaving when she blurted one more question:

"Jess? Why tell a love story now? Why not in _The Subsect_?"

It took him a beat of time to understand what she meant.

"I don't know, Rory." He shrugged in that particular way of his. "I guess before it just hurt too much."

He nodded almost imperceptibly, and she understood he was saying goodbye. So she stood there, watching him walk away.

\- x -

One week later, Rory was at Luke's, having the last ridiculously supersized breakfast of her vacation. The summer festival insanity was raging outside the window, Lorelai was doing her bit with Luke by the counter. Rory herself was doodling her itinerary: Logan had bought her tickets so she could spend a few days with him in New York. He had also been babbling incoherently about London for a few days; she thought it was prudent to make some room for the not-so-surprising surprise trip he would most definitely pull.

As she doodled, though, she found herself dividing the page in two, as if by reflex. She was absentmindedly making a pro-con list - but instead of actual arguments, she was putting the little fragments of truthiness she got from Jess, the kind his so-called girlfriend apparently had by the tens of thousands. She kept unraveling the Jess repertoire she had managed to learn, and after doing a complex zero-sum game in both columns she realized he had waited for her. He had waited for the past year or so, as he had waited when they were kids. Rory had done a lot of things, she had teased him and fallen for him, turned him on and turned him down, but she had never, ever waited for him - or for anyone else, for that matter.

And now he had found someone who would wait for him, so he was already gone by the time she woke up the next day.

She had been so pretentious to have thought she were the only narrative force behind his book. Jess was going home to _her_ and she was - well, she was going through the motions. Maybe that was all she had ever done, even when she was furiously in love with Logan, even when she was overwhelmed by Jess' mere presence.

She got up, feeling depressed to be returning to the D.C Summer, to her life that felt good but also slightly out of its rightful axis.

"Mom!" she called. Lorelai looked ammused at her impatience; she probably thought she was simply freaking out about missing the plane. And maybe that was it, maybe this wasn't some kind of crisis. It was just the anxiety of the day and all the change around. Things were fine after all.

Rory went behind the counter to give Luke a goodbye hug - they were both awful huggers but somehow they made it work.

Lorelai was already out the door, and Luke was already minding some kitchen drama, when Rory noticed the book by the register. Her book, in fact. Had Jess been re-reading it and then forgotten it, or had he left it there just so that she could find it?

She took it and skipped through the pages, noticing the sheer number of sentences and fragments he had underlined, circled or crossed, always angry, always in a hurry. It wasn't until much later, though, that she caught what he had written on the margins, in his smallest handwriting yet.

Virginia was talking about how the mind of the artist must be incandescent. _There must be no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed._

Vertically by the side of her argument, Jess had made a quiet objection: _after she was done with me, there was not much left to consume._


	4. the Artist as a Young Man, aka Booze

It had become a strange, sloppy tradition that every month or so Rory would receive a purple envelope with Jess' name on it. She lost some of them in the midst of her couple impromptu changes of zip code; since being in D.C, though, the purple envelopes were piling up, arriving more and more frequently. Inside there would be all kinds of invitations, for all kinds of delirious-sounding events. Rory would glimpse at them like a foreigner before softly, fondly stashing them into what she called, though she would never say it out loud, the Jess Drawer.

It was the bottom drawer, the one she would never look at much directly. She didn't use it anyway, since it involved too much exercise to reach and she was set to avoid that kind of thing. Since she gave the drawer this new attribution, it had become so full it was hard to close, and the envelopes were getting smashed and creased from all the shoving that was increasingly required. Because of that, Rory had re-located the most important envelope, from a couple months ago, the only one Jess had signed with his own angry handwriting: the invitation for his second book's launch party.

She did not attend it, of course. I mean, not of course: she had seriously considered it, ached at the thought of it actually, but she eventually decided it was just a notch over her personal limit of bittersweetness for a single night. So she kept the invitation in her Jess Drawer and, when she felt ready, she gave it the sock drawer promotion, which put it closer to her thoughts. It had earned that mixed-feelings place in her closet somehow, distinguished from all the other identically purple envelopes – like this one, she thought, as she arrived from work and collected the mail that had been slipped under her door that morning. Except… this envelope was not the same. She turned it in her hands while kicking her shoes off; when she had already abandoned herself in the couch, exhausted from another day working ridiculously late, it finally occurred to her to maybe open the damn thing.

It was an invitation to the most delirious-sounding event possible: a play. An actual play, at an actual if obscure theater, with an actual cast of actual actors involved - and with and Jess' actual name among a number of writers and collaborators. From the synopsis, it sounded like it took place in the same alcohol-soaked fever-dream universe from his books.

But that was not the difference that bugged her from the start. She took a look at the envelope again.

 _Oh hey,_ she finally noticed, _it is not inviting me to Philly._ It actually said New York.

\- x -

"Ace?"

"I'm sorry, did you say something?"

"I know you are entertained, but can you look up from your book for a second? We are almost there so we really have to settle this."

"I'm so sorry, go on."

"Don't be sorry, I am not so petulant as to think I could ever compete with James Joyce for your attention."

"You know you can. Joyce is nice and all but he doesn't have a pretty face like yours. Also, I'm spending New Year's with you, not him."

Logan smiled, touching her tight briefly with one hand, the other one on the wheel. "I wouldn't be surprised if I looked for you at midnight and eventually found you in some corner with him, though."

Rory laughed. "Maybe if I am near the end of a chapter. But I trust you to bring you A-game regarding the midnight kiss. I'll only resort to Joyce if you do a poor job."

"That is a risk we will not run."

"Yet another department in which you leave the poor Irish man biting dust."

He nodded in amused agreement and she opened the car's window for just a moment, taking in the winter wind. She was already home, Stars Hollow was coming fast in her direction. That holiday at home was all she'd had in her mind for weeks, as she felt D.C was rejecting her like a body rejects an organ; it was nice to have home not only in her mind, but also in her field of vision for once.

"Have I thanked you for this?"

"For what?"

"Spending New Year's Eve here, at home with me."

"Don't be silly, Ace. It's not like I have a warm New Year's family party to go to. I mean, it does break my heart that I won't be shaking some news magnate's hand at midnight, so you do have your own competition regarding that kiss."

"But you could be spending it with your annoying friends doing some annoying stunt."

"I want to be here, Ace." He looked at her, and laughed when she anxiously gestured him to put his eyes back on the road. "This is not any New Year's after all. It is important for your mother that you be here, and it is important to me that I am with you."

Logan could be so sweet - always with his straight-forward, no-nonsense brand of sweetness. Maybe things were beginning to fall into place. He had been squirming around since they met at election night, over a year ago: he would never miss her calls but he would never make room for a full week with her either. Well, he was not giving her a full week yet, but he was coming home with her, and it had been so long since the last time.

"Have you decided, though? Will you meet me in London? Or are you sticking with New York next week?"

She looked at him, closing her book. "I'm thinking New York. Please don't be mad!"

"I'm not."

"I mean, we'll see how mom is handling things. Maybe she won't mind me leaving January second. But I have the feeling she will have a breakdown after the party, so it is safer for us to catch up later in New York."

Logan smiled the calmest of smiles. "She has the right to a little breakdown. I assume she will save some for the wedding, though."

"No doubt."

"Are your grandparents coming?"

"Yes, sure. I mean, mom hasn't told grandma she is proposing, but it was not that hard to convince her to cancel her other plans. She pretended she was mad for a little bit, like she always does, but soon she was trying to re-do all of mom's arrangements for the party, which means she is super excited. Let's just hope Luke does say yes, otherwise we will never hear the end of it."

"It is so like your mom to have her engagement in New Year's. Make her wedding the theme of 2010."

"That is mom", Rory agreed. "But I can't really blame her, she does spontaneous well. Even if it means making everybody cancel their plans."

"Not unlike yourself."

"Hey!"

"I mean the spontaneous part." He laughed, reaching for the snacks in her lap.

"Everybody knows it is you who puts the spontaneous in our relationship."

"You are the one who turned this into a road trip though."

"True, but- "

"And I am still hoping you will spontaneously show up in London. New York is so much further along."

"It's just another week!"

"It's too much!"

"Well, it's not my fault that you keep bouncing around the world like a damn slinky. I am trying to keep up but it is not that easy, you know."

He smiled and they were silent for a bit. Rory went back to reading her book, and Logan would occasionally fish for some chips from the bag in her lap. Sometimes, between paragraphs, Rory would look at him from the corner of her eyes, trying to catch a glimpse of him in his natural state: holding the wheel, moving forward regardless of anything else.

What about her? Maybe she was just along for the ride; it was yet to be decided whether or not this would be a good thing. As they entered Stars Hollow together, three years or so since they had done it last, James Joyce said quietly: _her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call._ But wait, who was she calling again?

\- x -

The party took the whole house, the whole front yard, and there were already people turning Luke's into an extension of it. Her mother was radiant, her grandparents were having fun (if somewhat uncomfortable fun), and midnight was coming in their direction. Logan had charmed everyone he had talked to, like the perfect plus one he had always been; now he was sitting in one of the tables in the lawn, under the strings of light that crossed the yard, receiving the Miss Patty treatment and looking simultaneously amused and scared. Rory looked at him from the porch; maybe they _were_ going back to the way they used to be. That domesticity that could also be vibrant and fun. Maybe.

"I can't do this. I don't know what I was thinking."

Rory looked back at her mother, who was leaning against the front door and slightly hyperventilating.

"Have you _ever_ known what you are thinking?"

"Aren't you supposed to be soothing me right now?!"

"I am! This is you, mom. You and Luke. You know he wants this."

"Do you think the smoke machine is going to work?"

"I think maybe there is still time to rethink that one."

Rory stepped forward, holding her mother's shoulders, preparing herself to give her the ultimate pep-talk – and in that exact moment, Luke stormed through the porch and went inside the house.

"Luke", Lorelai asked, already sounding shaken. "What happened?"

He looked confused and worried, operating in his particular brand of angry distress. "Where is the damn phone? The damn thing never seems to stop ringing when we don't need it."

" _Why_ do you need it?"

He stopped for a moment. "Something with Jess… I don't know. It sounds serious."

"Where even is he? He was supposed to come, right?"

"He was not coming, he was spending New Year's with his girlfriend." Luke was walking around again, kicking people out of the couch and checking under the pillows. "But now I got a call at the diner, from some hospital that is not even in Philadelphia. I need to call his trainwreck of a mother but my cellphone refuses to work right now. Maybe it is trying to spare me the frustration." He was now moving angrily into the kitchen, kicking people out of there as well, while Lorelai distributed apologies after him. Rory was following them silently, not knowing which breakdown she would be required to help with.

"But what happened? Just tell me!"

"I don't know, Lorelai, all I know is the boy is not even conscious." He looked inside the fridge for the phone, only half-aware of what he was doing, angrily smashing the door afterwards. "I thought we were past those days. I can't believe we are not past those days."

"Luke…"

"Oh forget the damn phone. I have to go down there."

"OK, just… Just go. I'll tell Liz. Just call me as soon as you find a way and keep us informed."

He looked around, reassuring himself of what he had to do. "OK… OK. I'll do that."

As soon as he left the kitchen, Lorelai let herself fall in one of the chairs. She looked like she was about to cry.

"Mom…"

"Why does this keep happening? Maybe it is some kind of sign."

"Mom, nobody could have predicted this. It looks like it was serious and we don't even know what happened yet. Let's wait before presuming the universe is giving any sort of unsolicited opinion."

"But this is not how it was supposed to go!" Lorelai held her own head, facing the floor, sounding heartbroken. "Things keep getting in the way. It is like Luke just has to take care of every single aspect of everybody's lives even when it is not his job. I just- "

"Mom!" Rory interrupted her, stepping forward; she felt a sudden burst of rage. "What are you even talking about?"

Lorelai looked at her, not understanding - so she continued, shaking with anger: "You were gonna ask him to marry you! Those 'everybodies' who keep getting in the way are his children!" Now Lorelai avoided looking at her at all costs, even as Rory furiously chased her gaze. "You should know that. Jess and April will be your children too. Can't you take your head out of your own ass even for a second, even for what seems like a literal medical emergency?"

Her mother's eyes went blank. "Oh my god. Oh my god, you are right."

Rory kept silent, still standing, still angry. Lorelai looked increasingly horrified.

"How can I… how can I do this to Luke." She leaned against the table again, staring at its surface. "Maybe I am not ready for this."

Rory looked at her with stone eyes. "Maybe you aren't."

When the countdown began a couple hours later, Rory was sitting alongside Logan, holding his hand in her lap; when midnight came, though, she missed the exact moment to kiss him, so distracted she felt. The actual kiss she gave him was already a full minute into the new year, and already had the feel of an apology.

\- x -

Luke had come back early the very next day. Rory thought at first this was a good sign - but whenever she would try to get information from him he would just grunt incomprehensibly and find some laughable reason to leave the room. She spent the whole day looking for excuses to drop by Luke's and fish for some clue of what was going on; this strategy had the benefit of keeping her away from home and from her mother, with whom she was still inexplicably mad, but aside from that it was not showing results. By the time Logan left, the day after that, she was so anxious for any kind of information she was developing weird rashes in the weirdest places.

She could tell Logan was generally disappointed that she would not make the obvious decision and go to London with him, but the thought of doing so barely crossed her mind. Sure, since she was not in good terms with her mother she might as well go - plus, her help with post-proposal madness was no longer required. But still, she felt nailed to the ground. Logan's disappointment registered distantly, like the ring of a cellphone that wasn't hers; for no specific reason, she felt like there was no point in leaving just yet.

Which made her sudden decision later that night all the more weird.

The second day of the year was a Saturday. She had breakfast with Logan at Luke's, right before he left for London; she had lunch at Luke's, by the counter, making the most direct questions she dared and not getting any satisfying answers; and now she was having dinner at Luke's, a big-ass hamburger, reading the same paragraph in her book for the eleventh time and not absorbing any of it.

Luke was a definite wreck: he had been yelling at people and getting orders mixed up all day. In fact, the only reason she was eating something remotely similar to what she had actually ordered is that she had exchanged her mixed-up pancakes with Kirk's assigned burguer. Whatever had happened, Luke was not taking it easy. It couldn't have been too serious though, since he came back so early. Or could it? She scratched the back of her ear, where the rash had already hurt her skin pretty bad. As she tried again to read that damn paragraph, she pictured Jess in a hospital bed, and suddenly she was fighting off tears.

She felt like she missed him. In the year that had passed she had seen him exactly once, for maybe an hour, by the bridge. And sadly it was not the exception but the rule in their lives, as it had been since he left Stars Hollow, forever ago. Their brief encounter in Chicago had been a glitch, a delirious strain on reality. What would she say at the front desk if she were to visit him in the hospital? Was she a friend? Maybe, technically, she was distant family, like a cousin you awkwardly greet at Christmas parties? Luckily he would never show up at Christmas parties anyway. Maybe she could tell the nurses their whole story and let them decide for themselves. It was not a boring story, after all. It was just broken in too many pieces.

She tried to picture herself visiting him. Maybe she would sit by the bed and read him the newspaper, tell him the backstage gossip behind the latest Congress reports. Not that it would be remotely possible: for all she knew, he might or might not be in the hospital, might or might not be in Philadelphia, might or might not had been through something serious a couple hours before New Year's. His girlfriend might or might not be taking care of him already. But still, it would have been nice to visit. To have her name in the list of people who could visit, at least.

Then she remembered the play he had written, that would be going on for another month in that obscure theater house in Queens. Every single Friday and Saturday, at nine and at eleven pm, no exceptions. That would be close enough to visiting; if she could not read him the news, some stranger could read her his words. It would be weird, convoluted and bittersweet all the same. And it would also be just as much of a bad idea.

She looked at the clock: seven thirty. If she left soon she could easily make it to the second show.

She scratched her ear again, feeling that slightest of pains that is also so pleasurable. Then she looked down at her book, and it told her everything she needed to be told:

 _I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too._

\- x -

"What do you even mean?"

"I don't really understand what part has you confused? Tonight's show is really sold out. Like, the seats? All taken," the manager was saying, surprisingly calm considering Rory had pretty much chased her down.

"How can that be?! It is the second day of the year, don't these people have anything better to do?! I mean, no offense."

"None taken." The woman was pretty and she had a lot of tattoos and she looked professional in a way that had no overlap with Rory's way of looking professional; she also looked like she was above getting offended by pretty much anybody. "I don't know if you've been here before, but the theater is small, and we do have a faithful audience, so it's always full. Maybe I could get you tickets for next week? Those are only half sold."

"You don't understand, I need them _right now_. I drove two hours to get here and I need to have a good reason for stealing my mother's car if I have any hope of reconciliation with her before going back to work, of before next New Year's, or before she does get married, because- "

"You are losing me here, lady" the manager was now checking unrelated papers in her clipboard, still looking annoyingly like she had just arrived from a concert from a great band Rory had never heard of. "This show is going on tour, so maybe you'll be able to catch it later?"

"Listen" Rory collected herself; if she were Lorelai, she would already be inside eating some popcorn. "I absolutely need to watch this today. I understand you are busy with your theater stuff, so I am just going to sit here on the sidewalk, giving my best to obstruct the way and waiting for you to give me a solution, OK?"

The manager gave her a look that boiled down to "whatever, crazy white person", and disappeared behind a restricted-access door. Rory kept her inconsequential threat, sitting in the sidewalk in the most obnoxious way possible, opening her book and waiting for the situation to solve itself. And, like she had forced the hand of fate, solve itself it did.

"When they described to me the flavor of crazy we got in the house tonight, I did think it sounded awfully Gilmore-like. But I wasn't expecting to be this right."

Rory looked up and could not help but smile. "We Gilmores do have this nasty habit of getting things our way."

"And I feel terrible enabling that behavior," Jess said, giving his hand to pull her up, "but would you maybe like to watch if from the wings with me? That is my best effort in satisfying your every wish."

"Throw some popcorn in that deal and I won't even trash you on Yelp", she answered, taking his hand.

"So many things wrong with that sentence", he shook his head, but he did smile through it. "And you know, most people save the popcorn for the movie screenings."

"Oh my god, Jess, would you learn to be a diva? Aren't you the author?" She dusted herself off. "You should be asking for Egyptian cotton towels in your dressing room or something."

"You don't really know how any of this works, do you?"

"Not really, but that popcorn machine looks shiny and professional and since I am being such a toddler already I thought, why not go all the way?"

"Fair enough" Jess nodded, in that way that was the same of a loud laugh for him, and guided her behind the little concession stand counter.

"Can I say this is kind of surreal? Attending your play?"

"It _is_ surreal, no argument there." He turned the machine on and handed her the kernel package. "Do you want to have the honors?"

She accepted excitedly, and went on with the interrogation while pouring kernels into the machine: "how did this happen? I mean, the play?"

Jess sat down; his voice sounded weak. Something about him was off.

"Truncheon has been making some contacts, we wanted to be part of a larger conversation with other independent publishing houses. Then some guys at Baltimore Rock Opera Society happened to really like that lame book of mine, so we started working on a play adaptation even before the launch party. One thing leads to another and now we are making a small tour. It's been an interesting experiment. We are getting to know a lot of interest work from new people."

"Oh, mom told me something about you guys expanding Truncheon and such, she said it was going great."

A laugh broke through the tiredness in his face: "We are not expanding, jeez, Rory! We are building collectives with other non-profit art centers. It is all very collaborative. We are not opening franchises like some fast-food chain."

Rory blushed for the first time that night; it didn't take too long, she thought. "Oh I am sorry if we sell-outs don't have your hipster lingo down."

"You are not sell-outs, you are just bourgeois business-oriented venture-capitalistic mayo-white Stars Hollow people and it shows. Nothing wrong with that, but it does raise some questions."

"Oh really?" She put down the kernel package and turned to face him. "For example?"

"For starters, I wonder if you can make a decent batch of popcorn. You haven't even glanced at the butter yet."

Rory laughed and threw some kernels at him. "Please go ahead then, dazzle me with your artistic, proletarian, collective-oriented popcornical skills."

"Just give me that" he was laughing too. As he poured an obscene amount of butter into the machine, he asked, "why did you come, though? That was definitely a surprise."

"I don't know, I was in Stars Hollow for New Year's." She tried to sound casual, or at least to sound more sure of her reasons than she felt. "Seemed like as good a chance as any. I did not imagine you would be here, though."

"Yea, I've been back and forth New York for the play's run, there is always some emergency or other. Give or take a crazy person lying in the entrance" Rory laughed, with no shame whatsoever. "I've been crashing in some friends' couch or even in here sometimes. It was fateful that you found me."

"You and I only operate in fateful mode, it seems." She noticed she had given him pause, as he handed her a popcorn bag and they headed backstage. "It is impressive that it was sold out, though. Is it really always like that?"

"Well, have you seen this place? It is so damn tiny. You could probably fill it before going through half the contacts on your phone. Hell, through the contacts on Luke's phone. That's how tiny it is."

"I swear I am going to punch you one of these days. Can't you artists ever take a compliment, ever?"

Now it was a little darker and she couldn't really tell whether she had successfully made him blush, but he did blurt a muted "thank you". They sat on the floor, in a little corner out of the way in the wings of the stage. She would see the whole thing backwards, but it felt really exciting; she hadn't being backstage anywhere since the Stars Hollow production of _Fiddler on The Roof_.

"This is just so cool", she told Jess. "I think I am having a bit of a power trip, being such an insider to a theater production."

"It will pass when you get your first dick closeup."

The horrified look on her face made him laugh soundly, in a way he didn't do often.

"You are kidding, right?"

"Not at all. If you put on a play around here and it doesn't have at least three naked people in it, everyone thinks you are some kind of prude."

Rory was seriously blushing, and Jess couldn't stop laughing.

"Would you relax? It is just people's bodies. There is nothing in there you have never seen before."

"Speak for yourself!"

He was shaking his head, delighted at her embarrassment, when they heard the third sound signal; the play was about to start, and the theater went silent.

"Don't move too much," he whispered close to her, holding her arm, "and we'll be fine in here."

She gave him one last look, which he sustained, and then the room went dark.

\- x -

"That was surreal" Rory was saying, a little while after the play was over, when Jess finally met her by the sidewalk after dealing with standard backstage drama. "It was just… so surreal. I am not sure I'm not in a dream sequence right now."

He was laughing, but now, looking at him more closely under the street lamps, she realized he looked pale, washed out. His gestures were more contained and his smiles didn't have any sharp angles.

"I'll chose to understand that you liked it."

"Oh it was amazing" she said, out of breath. "I mean, your writing is already so… I don't know, synesthetic? It is so sensorial. Watching it happen in front of you? Really powerful. And you did a really great job with the adaptation."

"Well I was just kind of there in the adaptation process." He shrugged, like was his habit. "I didn't know the first thing about it, so it was nice to have so many people collaborating. The crew says we are not quite Brecht material yet but we are getting there. Nothing like a little megalomania to get you through a tour."

"I think you already have a Berliner Ensemble thing going on." She stopped walking when they reached her car. "I mean, your writing doesn't scream Epic Theater, but- "

"Yea, can't say I have ever aimed for rational self-reflection. Brecht would say I am a complacent motherfucker."

"But it is for the best! Seriously, the play is so full of emotional catharsis. It works beautifully, it feels like the story's chapters are all divergent. Maybe Brecht would despise it, but he would still raise an eyebrow. Plus, all the alcohol you write into all of your stuff? It would definitely get his attention."

"Now you are just babbling." She finally got a glimpse of a crooked smile, and that soothed her. "So, why are you driving your mother's car?"

She sighed. "That… is a long story. Well, maybe not long, but convoluted."

He nodded and didn't ask for more information; instead, he simply stated: "you are going back to Stars Hollow, I suppose."

"Yes, yes I am." She got the keys from her pocket, and then a sudden inspiration hit her: "… maybe you would want a ride? The next show is just next week anyway, right? And you look like you could use sleeping in a bed."

He gave her a suspicious look. Despite feeling embarrassed, for some reason she also felt strongly about this. So she kept going:

"I'm sorry, but it's true, you do look like crap. And I could use the company through that creepy 84 road after 1 AM. And also… I have a feeling Luke would like to see you."

She could see she had tapped into something: he looked around slowly, making up his mind.

"… Ok", he finally gave an answer. "I just have to put a few things in order, it'll be quick. Would you wait for me?"

She gave him her full, undivided stare, for the first time in so long. "Yes. I'll wait for you."

\- x -

"So, how come the car scenes didn't make it to the stage adaptation?" Rory asked, half an hour into their road trip; she was driving, he was looking longingly through the window, toying with a cigarette in his hands.

"Why do you ask?"

"Those were my favorite scenes!"

"Oh yea?"

"Yea" she nodded for emphasis. "The car scenes. And some others."

He gave her a look from the corner of his eyes; maybe she had made him curious. She knew he wouldn't admit it, though.

"I'm glad you like them, I suppose I like them too. I did fight with my editor to keep them."

"Why on Earth would she want to cut them?!"

"She thought they were redundant, I guess."

"Was she high or something?"

"It's possible", he laughed. "But she still had a point."

"No she has not, not at all. I don't know, there is something about those scenes. The dialogue is different. Flows different."

"Yea, that was the reason I wanted to keep them. Being with a stranger inside a car is a weird exercise in instant intimacy. I thought I would explore that."

"But they were not really strangers, were they? They were in love."

"Huh", was his answer.

"What?"

"It is funny that you think those two things can't be true at once."

She paused. It was like a pastime to him, to trap her like this, using nothing but her own words. He had chosen the right career, she thought. But so had she.

"Now that you mentioned it, I think I'll take advantage of this forced intimacy of ours right now and solve the mystery of your list."

"Nobody has ever accused you Gilmores of not being ambitious."

"Very true."

"Maybe you would settle for just the next item? Those were out terms after all. One item at a time."

"I am not bargaining with you, Jess, I have the upper hand here"

"I am not bargaining either, not yet, anyway. I am simply stating facts."

"So maybe state some facts about that damn list!"

"Oh no, stern face has settled in! I am beginning to question my own judgment in getting into this trap of a car with you."

"And yet, here you are."

"Yea, here I am. Here we are." He looked out the window again, at the snowy road. "If I recall correctly, we had left it on 'booze'?"

"That would be correct, yes."

"Well, you know. After I went to California things were... weird. I remember I was so angry all the time. I just hated everybody."

Rory glanced at him and she could swear she saw the moment come and go, the moment when he could have actually said something honest; but it was gone even before she put her eyes back on the road.

"So what happened?" She tried to push it.

"Oh you know." He shrugged like he was never serious. "I'd drink a lot, so I'd love everyone. And then I'd drink even more and end up hating them even more than I did before."

"Oh bite me Jess!"

"Why?!"

"Now you are just quoting the lyrics to a Strokes song."

He laughed hard, then turned his body in her direction. "I can't believe you caught that."

"I can't believe you thought you could con me like this!"

"When did you become a Strokes kinda girl, anyway?"

"When have I not been a Strokes kinda girl? Seriously Jess, words hurt, you know?"

"I'm sorry!" he raised his hands in a surrender gesture, still laughing. She was laughing too; he deserved to be busted for once.

"In fact, I think I have that CD somewhere in here."

"You're kidding."

"It is probably on the glove compartment or laying around the floor somewhere."

"I can't believe you have been a Strokes fan all along." Jess was saying while looking for the CD under the seats. "What does Lane think of this?"

"She says Strokes is her guilty pleasure because it is too mainstream, but I know it is very little guilty and very much pleasure."

"Can't really blame her. I am still a sucker for them." He handed her the CD, and she put it on with a smile.

"Are you going to tell me the real story now or what?"

"There is not much to tell, I swear. Booze is really booze. I was in Venice, working in a bar, hating myself, drinking by the beach until sunrise. That is pretty much all I did for a while."

"Was that when you met your girlfriend?" she asked with a sudden intuition for the weak spot in his story. He did look taken aback when he answered:

"… yes." He turned away from her. "How did you know?"

"Well, in the book you link her pretty strongly with the sea." She glanced at him at numerous turns, but he still didn't look at her. "That is what you told me, anyway."

"Yea, I did, didn't I", he sighed. "I met her there, yes. She was hitting the road with some friends, they came to the bar every day for a week. Then they went back home, but she stayed, and she kept coming."

"And what next?"

"Oh, she would sit by the counter, every day, for another month. She would help me close. She would come with me to the beach. She hated herself too by that point, you know; she had been out of high school for over a year and had finally realized she was not going back."

"So you were both lost."

"I would say so, but I don't know if 'lost' has ever applied to her. She operates in a different wavelength, I have never met anybody quite like that. She spent that month with me and didn't ask for anything, she left the same way she came. But she said I could visit her in Philly."

"In Philly?"

"Yea. I couldn't go right away though. I finally realized things were getting out of control in California, so I went back to New York, tried to distance myself from all that shit. It was useless, I was barely getting by. I had already crossed it from the list. I should have known."

"So you decided to look for her in Philly." She looked at him when she asked, but not when he answered.

"I did. We were friends for a while, I found some peace to write. Things began to fall into place."

"But when did you…"

"I don't know, exactly. We kept some distance for a long time, even though we kept finding ourselves in each other's beds."

"What made it change?"

"Anything. Everything. She is like the sea. She knows how to hit you when she wants to."

Rory kept silent, and Jess did too, as was his natural state. She did want to ask more, when, how, why. She couldn't really decide on a WH question, though, and as the CD kept playing, what she ended up saying was this:

"This song could have been about you, you know."

"How come?" He gave her his first crooked smile yet.

" _He would never talk, but he was not shy_." As he shook his head laughing, she continued, "No problem though. I've had tough sources before."

"I'm sure none of them were tougher than you."

She looked at him yet again, leaning his head against the window, looking awfully pale; not even the cold winter night tint his face red. But she had already managed to make him blush once, and she thought she might as well give it another try.

"Do you think love is a razorblade, like the song says?"

She felt his gaze on her, and she tried her hardest to keep looking ahead. But his voice sounded playful when he answered:

"No, not a razorblade. More like a laserquest."

"I see your girlfriend has mellowed you."

"She has, hasn't she." He seemed a bit uneasy, and then he made a gesture to the side of the road "We should take a break. We are about to hit a truck stop with really good food, and I am seriously starving. You know, though my life is modest, I believe in eating well."

"Now, what book did you get that from?"

"I can't get away with anything in front of you, can I? It is _Dubliners_. James Joyce." He took the book out of his back pocket, turning it in his hands. "My copy is actually a double-feature kind of thing. It's _Dubliners_ in one side and the other side is- "

" _A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_ ", Rory interrupted him.

"Yes" he agreed, suspiciously. "Wait…"

Rory laughed. "Check my purse. Go on."

"I can't believe this." He laughed too. She was reading the exact same edition. "But why didn't you begin with _Dubliners_? When I got my copy I thought it was a no-brainer of a choice."

"Who knows", was her answer. "Maybe I was already planning on seeing your play and I wanted some insight into the madness I knew I was bound to witness." She paused to look at him. "Oh my god, now you are seriously blushing! I can't believe I actually made you blush this hard. Your face is never going back to normal."

"Just shut up and pull over by the truck stop."

"I made you blush. I mean, I know I have done it before, but I was never 100% positive it wasn't a lighting trick or something."

"God, Rory, I can't take your nonsense with my stomach this empty."

"You're right, we should probably eat. Maybe that will help relocate the blood away from your face."

He grunted, and she knew he was defeated, which made her feel, once again, like no time had passed at all. The CD kept playing and, by the time she pulled the car over the greasy truck stop, lit supernaturally by blinking fluorescent lights, the music was little more than a constant, soft background noise:

 _you won't say it now, but in your heart it's loud:_

 _"oh, my feelings are more important than yours."_

\- x -

"So, there is this short story in _Dubliners_ , A Little Cloud", Jess was saying excitedly, neglecting his giant hamburger. "It is just so brutal for me, most days. The way Little Chandler gets to live a diluted version of the life he wants. He never does become a poet, he is stuck as a clerk." He finally took a bite, dripping mustard all over. "When it's 3 AM and you're having writer's block, that is not what you want to hear. But it is a good reminder."

"A reminder?" Rory asked, going through her own ridiculously, deliciously greasy burguer.

"To take all the steps. Read the damn poetry aloud. Live the life you set out to live."

"I see. But don't spoil it! I am not there yet."

"I am not spoiling anything! That is pretty much the theme of all Joyce's books."

"But this is a drunken, escapist take on that theme. It is not what you should be reading at your scheduled 3 AM writer's block appointment."

"What have you been reading to get through yours?"

"Says who I have 3 AM writer's block?"

"I do know you a little bit, Rory."

He was looking at her, which he hadn't been doing a lot that evening. She wanted to sustain that look, but she ended up staring at her fries. "I'll tell you, but please don't laugh."

"Can't promise that."

"Jess!"

"Just tell me, Rory. I promise I'll only mock you behind your back."

"I've been reading and re-reading _The Audacity of Hope_." He looked clueless, so she explained: "… by President Obama, you know?"

"OH" he choked on his Coke while laughing. "OK, that _is_ cheesy, but if you had to stick with something from the election year, I suppose it could be worse. You could be reading whatever garbage John McCain has written."

"Well…"

"Jeez, Rory!"

"I read them for research! And they are OK. A lot of sad war stories."

"So, OK, huh?"

"… yea, they kind of suck." He laughed, she sighed. "They sure weren't the most boring politician books I ever read, though. Last month there was some serious competition."

"Why are you still reading this junk anyway?" Jess asked with innocence, his face full of ketchup.

"Well, I have been writing a lot of congressmen's profiles. Still haven't bagged the chance to write a single congresswoman's. But that is life, I guess."

"What do you mean, that is life? Life is writing boring garbage you don't care about?"

"It is not exactly like that."

"What is it like then?" She did not answer right away, so he continued: "When I saw you in Chicago you looked so into this politics stuff."

"I was!"

"So what changed?"

She tried to pin a reason, thinking about it in those terms for the first time, while Jess waited for her answer, burping as he finished his Coke.

"Back then it was different. It was the campaign, there was this electricity in the air, this feel of change. Plus, I was a smaller fish. I got a lot of little stories, but fun ones."

"Like what?"

"You know, going after people in little rallies and hearing their stories, understanding why they were there. Viewing the big picture through a small frame. All that jazz."

"And why the hell aren't you doing something like that now?"

"I don't know, one thing led to another…" She frowned. "I got some high-profile offers to write a piece here and there. Moved to Washington for one of those jobs, the job was over but I stayed. I was in a good position for freelancing, already had the contacts, it made sense."

"Does it make sense now?"

"Well…"

"I'm not telling you to throw everything away. You have built something and that's obvious." He was now drinking _her_ Coke and speaking with a new-found seriousness. "But you don't have to settle for what makes sense. I'm sure you've learned a lot, but if you're no longer learning, maybe you should go out there and put some stuff into practice."

She leaned forward, tilting her head, trying to see through his words.

"Put into practice", she repeated.

"Just a thought. Maybe chase the story you want for a change. I think that is the one thing you haven't done yet, right?"

"I… yea. Maybe there is something there."

He looked at her knowingly and she realized he was drinking all of her Coke, so she stole his fries.

"You know, there's this quote in the President's book", she told him, taking the fries out of his reach despite his protests. "He mentions the idea that everybody is trying to either live up for their parents' expectations or to make up for their parents' mistakes, and then he says, ' _I suppose that may explain my particular malady as well as anything else.'_ "

"Yea, that sounds about right." Jess said, finally managing to steal some fries back and then standing up, ready to leave. "I wish I could get to that stage, though. I'm still stuck at the previous step. Repeating my parents' mistakes."

Rory got up too, and tried to lock his eyes in. They were not the usual dark; there was a dim, opaque shadow over them. He looked slightly ill, like he hadn't slept for a week, though he had more color to his face after that extreme ingestion of cheese and greasy meat. Looking at him like that, under the white lights in some truck stop in I-84, surrounded by snow in every direction, being apart from him for so long, Rory felt such a strong wave of affection she almost had to sit back again. So she told him:

"You know that is not true. You are way beyond that, Jess, you did it, all on your own. Your mistakes are your own, not your parents', and you have fixed all of them."

"All of them, yea." He walked towards the door, already stepping into the snowy outside, already out of her reach. "All of them, except for one".

\- x -

They were silent for a long time. Rory was driving, and also beginning to feel the weight of that day full of weird decisions: her muscles were a bit sore and her eyes were getting heavy. It was late, after all, and her head was also heavy with the words Jess had said and, even more, with the words he refrained from saying. She felt curious, she wanted to keep poking, but she also had a weird feeling of disallowance.

The minutes were going by, the CD was repeating itself, things were getting fuzzy and hazy. She looked at Jess and it seemed like he had never been anywhere else in the world but the passenger seat of her car, laying his head against the window, his dark eyes closed and out of sight. In fact, she realized, they were too far out of sight… he had fallen asleep.

Had she ever seen he sleep? Well, yes. But not like this. This was sweet but also unsettling. Asleep, Jess wasn't angry or defensive: his eyes were not fiery and his hands, normally full of movement and intention, were lying still by his side. He looked a bit cold, she noticed, and worried over it. Even if he looked calm, he did not look peaceful; there was still some tension in his face and, most noticeably, he still looked like crap. She had never seen a person more in need of slowing down - not even at exams season at Yale, not even with the overworked, underpaid journalists she knew by the dozens when they had deadlines approaching. Actually - she interrupted her own stream of thoughts - that was not quite it, this was different. He looked calm, he looked contained, he didn't have that frantic energy of a pressure-full newsroom - that was the problem. He looked like he had no energy at all, but still he kept going, like he was using the force of a pound to lift an object that weights just an ounce.

What is going on with you, Jess? Her eyes refused to cooperate with her inquiring any longer. Every time she glanced at him, she felt what little attention she had slip away, and her grasp of the wheel get looser and looser. She thought briefly of waking him up and asking him, hey, keep me awake, be a damn co-pilot. Speculate on Joyce's sexual life, quote some other songs by bands you are too cool to like but still likes anyway. Talk about anything and everything. Shake me if you need too. Tell me something I don't know and something I do know. But, of course, she could never do that.

A sign told her the distance she still had to cover, and it was too much. She realized now she was not made for things like these, like spontaneously driving across state lines and coming back right away. She had been able to drive straight to New York earlier that same day, yes, but she did it on sheer willpower and maybe some acute anxiety. She realized that right now a break was called for.

She looked at Jess again. What she had to do was wake him up, ask him to drive. She remembered the teenage feeling of excitement she had the last time she let him drive her car. It was like she was allowing him into her life and he was surely, aggressively getting in, taking the wheel, installing chaos and havoc and then graciously handing the whole mess back to her and saying: when will you ever choose me? Well. She would wake him up anyway. It was a reasonable assumption that maybe this time he wouldn't crash her car.

But looking at him again she realized she could never do it. He looked so tired and his face had a permanent lost expression she had not seen in a really long time. He looked like his teenage self again, the same one that had been with her in a car crash, unable to say what had to be said. He was not the same person he was back then, she could see that: his hair was shorter and cleaner, his arms were stronger, his movements were more precise. But, right now, he did look exactly the way he used to. And if past Rory had never gathered the courage to wake him up back then, present Rory wasn't able to do it, either.

As she forced herself to remain awake, pondering possible courses of action, she saw a sign: it said "Belvedere", and pointed a way.

Isn't this a day for impulsive decisions, she thought, realizing she had followed the sign into a little road. She kept driving to finally arrive at a paved terrace with no actual buildings around; just a big, enormous, gigantic gap where the view expanded itself. A lot of city lights in the distance, a lot of stars in the night sky.

I can take a small break right here, she thought. Just for a little while.

So she searched in the back and found the laundry Lorelai had stashed there and procrastinated to deliver to the dry cleaning. Some smelly blankets, a stomach full of junk food, and a starry night, she pondered. This is actually not bad at all.

She covered Jess up and she covered herself, getting comfortable in the driver's seat, closing her eyes for just a moment, just a second. As that second expanded itself into that starry night, she laid against her own window, further and further away from him; her legs, however, stretched themselves in his direction, getting tangled with his own, their knees touching like this small point of convergence was enough for today.

\- x -

"Oooo, what the fuck" she heard a voice in the distance, and closed her eyes harder in protest. The voice, though, kept going: "What the FUCK?..."

"Ssshhh" Rory complained instinctively, trying to go back to her blissful sleepy state.

"Rory, where the fuck are we?"

Wait, whose voice is this? Oh right, it's Jess. Wait, why is that again?

She took the final step into consciousness and saw Jess outside the car, wandering around the grass in that hilltop, smashing the thin coat of snow. She blinked a number of times, hating to be waking up, and in the meanwhile Jess came back, his hair even messier than it was before, full of the smallest drops of snow.

"Oh, so you are not dead or anything. That's one less thing to worry about" he said once he found her awake. "Why the fuck are we in this no-man's land, though? Did we die and then wake up in some Albert Pyun movie?"

"I was sleepy" she explained, in a sleepy way with a sleepy voice. "Thought I should stop for a little break."

"Yea, the littlest" he pointed at the horizon. "The sun is coming up any second now."

"How do you even know that? It is still super dark."

"When the sky is deep purple like this, it is almost dawn. At least that's how it is around Stars Hollow."

She looked at him, still clutching her blankets, and imagined the research process teenage Jess went through to get that information. "How far are we, anyway? I saw it in a sign but I don't really remember."

"I'd say twenty minutes. See over there? That is already the town square. You can tell, because it is so disproportionately bright with Christmas lights you almost go blind, even from a few miles away."

"Oh yea, Taylor wouldn't take them off."

"I figured. So, should we keep going?"

"Wait…" She looked at him, in the nearly complete dark; she could barely see anything except for the reflex of the snow in his hair. "Shouldn't we wait for the sun to rise? It seems like we are in the perfect spot to watch."

"Yea?" She could hear the surprise in his voice, even without seeing his face. "Well I suppose if we haven't frozen to death yet, we won't freeze to death now."

"Oh god, I always forget how much of a drama queen you can be!" She threw the blankets at him. "It is not even _that_ cold, and even if it was, I built us some serious shields."

"I noticed" he said, getting comfortable again. "How did that even happen, anyway? Where did you magically get blankets?"

"Are you comfy?"

"There's no denying that."

"So that is all you need to know." She didn't want to spoil the moment by telling him for how many weeks those blankets were laying there, begging for some washing. In the dark, she couldn't tell if he had figured it out. Hm, she pondered for a minute when the idea hit her - maybe she could use the dark for her advantage.

"Jess?"

"Yea?"

"What happened in New Year's?"

"Rory…" he started, already squirming.

"I just, I don't know what to think." All of her contained curiosity and worry were cut loose now . "I asked Luke all day for two days and he wouldn't give me anything. He was a complete wreck when he came back, and I have been worrying ever since he snapped at the party, and now I came here, and I saw you, and there's something that is just so wrong about you right now and I can't really tell what it is and I might never recover from being here not even knowing if you are ok or if you need some kind of help or anything to fix whatever it is that is wrong with your face."

She ended her rant out of breath and scratching the back of her ear with fury. Jess was inscrutable behind the darkness and the deliberate bland tone of his voice.

"So, Luke…"

"A total wreck. I don't even know how he managed to open the diner. He was lashing out at everyone."

He looked down, nodding very slowly. Rory felt the situation was helpless.

"Where were you, anyway? How did you get to New York?"

"I was already in New York."

Rory pondered that information. "But, why? Weren't you supposed to be -"

"In Philly, yes. I was supposed to be in Philly, for Christmas, with my girlfriend and her family. I would be, if I wasn't so busy being absolute scum."

"Jess…"

"I just couldn't do it. I said I would, then the time came, and I couldn't do it." He now sounded restless like he was about to break something. "She called me and she was so heartbroken. She said we will talk later, but I don't even know if I want to talk. I can't keep doing this to her."

"Jess, you have to talk to her."

"This is not how this was supposed to go. I was ready. I was ready for this."

"You were scared you would disappoint her. If she is anything like you have been telling me, she understands this much."

"It is not her job to deal with this bullshit."

"Maybe she should have a say on this."

Rory had made him pause and he was now breathing heavily, in silence. She couldn't really tell if it was a good sign, but still she pushed him for one more fatal question:

"Jess? What does this have to do with New Year's? Did you do something stupid?"

His voice sounded the closer to breaking she had ever heard it sound when he said:

"Let this go, Rory."

"I can't let go of this! Jess, what did you do?"

"Nothing much, I swear. I just… I regressed a bit, climbed some steps down on that list. That was all. I should have known it would be useless. I had already crossed it, there is no going back in things like these."

"You mean, booze?"

"Yea, it was a good coping mechanism back in California. Thought maybe I should try it again. I was clearly wrong."

"But how on Earth did you end up unconscious, in a hospital, over some booze?"

He paused again. "… I didn't realize you knew this much."

"What happened? Did you get in trouble? Did Luke bail you out?"

"No! Listen, it was nothing. Everything was under control. Stupid Matthew panicked, that was all."

"It doesn't sound like booze was all this was." The truth had hit her but she didn't want to believe it. "Jess, did you… did you use something? Did you overdose?"

"Just let it go, Rory. It's done. It is nothing to be worried about anyway, especially not for Luke, who already has a full-time job that doesn't involve dealing with any of this bullshit."

"Stop saying that." Rory said softly, and even though the sun was still a few minutes away, she could already see a bit of his face under the first hints of pale light. "Just, Jess… "

"Rory, let this-"

"Sshh" she shut him up and pressed her forehead against his, holding his neck with a loose grasp. He was breathing even heavier now, even though he was completely still. They were frozen like that for a while, and then Rory began to slowly make her way into his seat. She didn't know what was driving her, but she wasn't panicked, it didn't feel wrong; she knew her heart was broken for him and in that moment she desperately wanted to touch him, to soothe him like she had never been able to do in the past.

"Rory" he called her name, like he would always call when cornered by her inexplicable advances.

"Sshh" she whispered again, already sharing his seat, holding his body with her legs, facing him. "I'm not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake."

"What?"

"You'll get to that part of the book eventually" she said, and then she kissed him. It was the slowest of kisses; he was frozen still for a long time, being kissed, with closed eyes and a weird detachment to what was happening. But then she kissed him a little harder, a little faster, and his hands began to explore whatever corner of her was within his reach, still slowly, still afraid. She found his belt, and soon it was gone; that was all she needed to do before she slowly guided him inside of her, under her skirt, over everything else. He called for her once again, and as she moved slowly in his lap, she touched the melted snow in his hair; she then ran her fingers through his shoulders and his arms, superficially at first, like she had no weight, but soon she was scratching him, using strength she didn't even know she had, leaving red marks in his sickly pale skin. He was quiet at first as he let her do it to him, but in the space of a few moments he became hungry and angry, pulling her closer, pulling her hair, trying to find her under her clothes. When it was over, she laid her head in his shoulder, still feeling him inside of her and most of all feeling the pull of his desperate embrace. Everything had happened so fast and yet, while they hugged each other, it felt like all of it was suspended in dawn.

When the sun was finally up, there was nothing holding that fragile arrangement anymore. Rory slid back into her sit, slowly, not knowing where to rest her eyes or what to do with her hands. Jess had reverted to his previous frozen state, which lasted for a while before he finally said, in the lowest of volumes, pretty much talking to himself:

"I have to go."

"What?"

"I have to get out of here."

"Jess, we are in the middle of nowhere."

He was already half leaving, the car door open, when he said, more to reassure himself than anything else: "You are twenty minutes away, the sun is up, you will get there OK."

He barely looked at her as he left, and then she was alone in the driver's seat, feeling all the mixed feelings there were to feel. When she finally composed herself and drove back into the road, the sun was shining in the exact angle to blind her. She got home soon, but her head was spinning with weirdness and regret. A great mistake, indeed.

She returned her mother's car to the place where she had found it; Lorelai was obviously still asleep. But she didn't feel like going home just yet. It was like the absolute lack of closure prevented her from getting comfortable. She wandered around for a bit before she decided to go in, take a shower, and leave on a hurry to catch a bus, and then a train. It took a while before she realized she was making her way back to New York, and even a longer while before she mustered the will to read one of the thousands of text messages her mother had been sending her. The last one said:

 _Rory, where are you? Luke is driving me crazy, Jess won't stop calling him asking if you got home ok. What's up with that? Answer me. No smiley faces until you do._

She finally answered saying she was ok and she would call later; that made the phone stop buzzing for a while. She felt hurt Jess didn't ask her that question directly; maybe she had got some contrived revenge by having him panic for a little bit without an answer.

She was already in the airport when she made the decisive call, the one that at last made her see clearly what she was doing:

"Logan" she said when she heard his imperturbable voice over the phone, "can you work your magic and get me tickets? I am ready for London right now."

\- x -

The next time Rory would see Stars Hollow would be the Fourth of July, when the city, as well as her life, was a mirror image of what it had been on her last visit. The snow and the Christmas lights were gone, and the quiet, cozy winter carnival had been replaced by the hot, raging, colorful insanity that was the Summer Festival. She and her mom had reverted to their lovingly ways over many phone conversations and over the general feeling of missing each other; still, they were both kind of dreading the moment when they would finally meet face to face again, afraid it would still be heavier than it should after their New Year's fight. Rory had everything planned out, though: she had decided to stay in Stars Hollow, instead of at Logan's, exactly so that they would have time to fix everything. In fact, maybe they'd even have _too much_ time - that was what she realized as she opened the door to the men (and the one woman) who were now carrying her boxes and putting them inside her childhood room.

She could see the look of horror in their faces when they got to the first of many book-filled boxes. Leaving them behind was never a possibility; she did consider keeping them in a storage in Washington for the duration of that "break" of hers, but it felt counterintuitive. She didn't know how long it would take for her to find what would come next, but she sure knew it would be far, far away from Washington and its dreadful summer. She made a mental note to tip the moving guys extra well, and then opened the first book box, wondering if the mess she had made with her life would take so long to fix that she would have to unpack all of those.

She soon found Jess' book, the one with the list, and though she put it in her pocket with an uncertain feeling, she did not open it this time.

\- x -

The town square was warm and she had received more friendly hugs than she could count, and those were only her first few hours back in Stars Hollow. She and Lane had hit all of the 12 different ice-cream stands and she felt mildly sick after eating one cone of each. When the fireworks were about to be launched, Rory realized she had lost her mother in the crowd. It wasn't an unprecedented event, so she headed to Luke's - it had always been the default general quarters in that sort of situation. It was almost midnight, so the curtains were drawn, but there was a light on somewhere - it had to be her mom, or maybe Luke if he had managed to break free from Lorelai's patriotism craze and get a break. The doors were locked, which was weird; she did have the keys though, one of the many tokens of Lorelai's adverse possession of the diner, so she didn't think too much about it.

There was nobody around; the diner looked peaceful in that slightly sad manner of usually crowded places when found deserted. The light was coming from the kitchen, and so was a soft sound of a turned-on radio, but there didn't seem to be anyone there, much less her mother. Rory looked around, touched the chairs that were left upside-down on the tables, and as she was trying to decide if she should steal some coffee before leaving, Jess bursted through the kitchen door.

"Oh" she said, containing the shock. Jess was carrying some bread and some cheese and - well, and a thousand other sandwich ingredients. He dropped more than a few of them upon seeing her. "I didn't… Hm… Hello."

"Hi" he answered, picking all kinds of canned goods from the floor and dropping them on the counter. "What are you doing here?"

His tone didn't sound too harsh but she still felt like he was sending her on her way. "Looking for my mother. Or for Luke, really."

"Well, haven't seen them."

Rory paused to looked at him before answering; he looked much better than he did the last time she saw him. His eyes were back to that vivacious dark that did not match the rest of his detached self. "What are you doing here, anyway? It seems I always catch you lurking around the town on the Fourth of July."

He shrugged, and the gesture was lighter than it was the last time. "That summer festival madness is hard to miss, but I do my best."

"The festivities are easier to avoid if you are some 200 miles south, you know, where you actually live."

"Gee, thanks for the unsolicited geography lesson" he said sharply, though he looked more amused than angry. "I try to show up so Luke doesn't get all passive-aggressive on me the next time. You know he is a softie about this stuff. "

"What stuff, patriotism?" Rory asked, still sounding cynical. "Have you met Luke?"

"No, Rory" he smiled at her crookedly. "Birthday stuff."

"Oh" she exclaimed, completely disarmed. "Your birthday is…"

"Today, yea." How could she not have known that? Her face was already heating up, breaking yet another record of her speed-blushing dash around Jess.

"Don't feel bad, Doogie" he said. "This was a hard trivia topic."

"Stop being condescending! You never told me this!"

"Well, you never asked."

"UGH, Jess!" she had angrily walked around the diner and was now sitting by the counter; Jess was smiling while proceeding to make his sandwich, clearly having fun at her frustration. After composing herself, though, Rory popped his amusement bubble by making another one of the many silly questions she felt compelled to ask him:

"I suppose you did tell your girlfriend you are a human person with a birthday date."

He looked a bit stiff when he answered "yea, I did. Tomorrow she is having a party for me at Truncheon."

Rory took that in, along with all the information he didn't say but that she still grasped. They were still together.

"Will it be a good party?"

"It usually is. I always find some other excuse for the thing though, so I don't feel so self-conscious. Last year it involved a dozen artistic performances showing all the possible ways of trashing an American flag."

"What about this year?"

"This year I'm just going to relax. Like you said, I am getting mellow."

She hesitated as they got closer to the territory of their last encounter. The music playing in the kitchen, she realized, was that same Strokes album they had listened to on the road.

"Here's your book, by the way." She put the Gabriel García Márquez on the counter, next to the cheese. He looked surprised.

"Did you know I was here or not?"

"Who knows", she answered simply. He took the book in his hands, even though they were more than slightly covered in ketchup.

"So you gave up on that story?"

"Well, there is only one item left on the list", Rory said bluntly. "And maybe I don't know what it means, but I know what it doesn't mean."

Jess suddenly looked up and stared at her with indecipherable eyes. "I so don't want to know where you are going with this."

He had dropped the book and was on his way to storm out, but Rory got up and smashed the door closed before he reached it. "Are you seriously going to bail on me? Again?"

He sighed so strongly it was almost a blow. "What do you want me to do, Rory?"

"I don't know, Jess! Maybe I want you to stop running from me!"

"Oh yea?" he had taken a few steps back, distancing himself from her. "So maybe _I_ want you to stop hooking me into one night stands that you know are going to leave me aching the next day, every time I am trying and maybe even succeeding at moving on with my damn life."

Rory didn't even know where all that anger had come from, but she was dangerously giving in to it. "What is that supposed to mean? Those were only one night stands because you wanted them to be. You are the one who is always bailing."

"Is that so?" he asked, almost screaming.

"Yes, that is so!" she screamed back.

"So you're telling me you were not back with that blond dick the second I left Chicago?"

"What?"

"It was literally on the newspaper, Rory. You, with him, at election night. Apparently he is the heir to one or two empires or whatever, which works out nicely for me, since I can get press coverage on your reasons to be spiting my heart out every chance you get."

"I… that wasn't…"

"Yea, sure" he snorted, walking back behind the counter and furiously going back to chopping stuff to put on his sandwich.

"That didn't have anything to do with us!" Rory insisted, turning to his direction. "It is not like you had come to Chicago just so that you and I could have another chance."

"How would you know that?" he said, ridiculously focused on his sandwich.

"I know, OK?" she answered, feeling increasingly like she would end up punching him. "If you did, you wouldn't be showing up out of the blue like you have always done, looking like you couldn't care less about anything, with your stupid concert tickets and your stupid crooked smile."

"Hey, that is not my fault!" he gestured angrily at her with his knife. "It is nerve damage on my lip!"

"Well I don't think you can blame me for falling for it either" she spit back. "You show up all of a sudden, you aggressively charm me into forgetting the way things have always been, and then the minute things get rough you are off to another zip code. Pardon me for not getting attached!"

During the little pause that followed, when Jess had no answer and kept chopping vegetables, Rory spilled the last bit of the resentment she had been holding on to for so long:

"Did you even, ever, love me?"

There was a loud noise when Jess hit the knife with full strength against the counter; Rory stepped forward when she realized he was bleeding.

"Jess…"

"If you won't allow me to leave" he said simply, holding his injured finger and grabbing some napkins to stop the blood, "maybe you are the one who should go."

Rory, deflated of all her anger, took some steps back and left, making the doorbell pathetically ring. Later that night, still hassled by the chronic confusion surrounding everything that had happened, she got into her mother's car to pick her up, along with three extra boxes of fireworks, from the side of the road to Hartford (long story). The minute she was leaving, she saw a book under the passenger's seat.

It was that double feature edition of James Joyce. Oh yea, she realized, she hadn't gotten back to the book since that weird night. It had simply vanished from her mind when she went to London.

She skipped through the pages in the _Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_ side, and didn't find any of the post-its with her notes. Wait, she thought, turning the book around and noticing the many folded pages in the book's _Dubliners_ half. This is Jess' book. Once again.

As if the book wanted to prove her right, the page that she randomly opened had a sentence circled again and again, so many times it was almost impossible to read. Rory held the page against the street light, and she couldn't help but start crying - pathetically, loudly crying - once she finally managed to read it:

 _"and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood."_


	5. Save Me the Waltz, aka Her

So, that little sterilized corner of her heart? Yea, that corner is gone, all contaminated. She could argue it was not like it had been perfectly sterile before, but right now, all of the sirens were sounding and a chemical shower was highly advised.

"Rory, are you listening to me?" She wasn't, really. All she could hear right now was the sound of the sirens pressing through her eardrums, demanding full possession of her brain.

"Of course I am, mom, go on."

"You are so not! It's like I am talking to that deaf librarian in Sesame Street. I'll need a puppet to interpret this conversation in sign language if this goes on any longer."

"Yea, like interpreting your speech is a job anybody would take ever. Their hands would fall down before the half-hour mark."

"I would rather phrase it as a professional challenge in the job interview – which I wouldn't have to do, if you were listening to me in the first place."

"OK, I am sorry, babble away." She noticed Lorelai paused for a second, visibly hurt, before choosing to continue. Rory felt like crap, but she couldn't help it. She had spread all 41 versions of her CV and also all of her bank documents on the kitchen table, trying to do the impossible math concerning her as-of-now very grim future, and it had been hard enough to do without losing track and thinking of Jess - of his blood on the counter, of his harsh words to her - even before Lorelai showed up with a box of Twinkies and started a monologue.

"So I found it and I screamed so loud that Paul Anka is still holding a grudge against me."

"And then?..."

"Well, I closed the box shut." Lorelai seemed to disconnect a little as she said it. "I guess the idea was to pretend I had never found it. But then, instead of putting it back, I just kind of left it there."

"You did what?!"

"I left the ring there, very visibly, on top of everything else."

"And then?!"

"Well, I kind of suddenly decided I had a crazy week at the inn and I was so, so busy, and I kind of kept myself out of the house for a couple days."

"A couple days?!"

"More like the whole week."

"Mom!"

"I know! I'm the worst!" She banged her head against the table.

"And then what did you do when you got back home?"

"Well, nothing."

"Nothing? And what did Luke do?"

"Pretty much nothing."

"Oh my god, mom. That is a completely new kind of crazy."

"I know."

"Like, a completely new, Lorelai-only limited edition shade of batshit crazy."

"I know!"

"Isn't that supposed to be what you wanted?"

"It is!"

"Isn't it kind of perfect that Luke doesn't even know you were going to propose and yet he spontaneously, lovingly, amazingly wants the same thing?"

"It is! It is perfect! I don't know what got to me! I simply could not help it. Every day I kept thinking, I blew this already, but it is not past the point of no return. I can go back home and I can kiss him and I can tell him yes, I found it, and I love it, and we are so, so happy together, and I want this so bad, and he is gonna kiss me back and be all kinds of relieved and it will the most awkward double-proposal ever to exist. But I couldn't. Every part of me screamed 'go home' and yet I managed to find a thousand little irrelevant things to do around the inn and everyone was weirded out and when I finally got back home at an hour that wasn't ridiculously, arbitrarily late, Luke was looking like he had thought it all through and was kind of OK with it and I just felt like bringing it up would make it all worse, and now I am sitting here, ringless and having hurt him, and I can't really bear that thought, so I am eating it away at this kitchen table and trying to get you to put some sense into me, which is not gonna work, because I am clearly miles beyond the point of reason, taking an exit to No-Marriage Land."

Rory didn't know what to say; it seemed Lorelai had used up all of the words there ever was. She touched her mother's arm, and then slid in the chair to hug her, and in that senseless defeat she felt a piece of her own. She almost laughed, thinking of Jess: were both Gilmores made for defeat, after all? But all she said was:

"It's OK, mom. He loves you. Do you have any doubt on that subject?"

"Not really", Lorelai answered, fighting tears, and then with a steady, surer voice: "Not at all."

"Do you have any doubts about loving him?"

"God, no."

"You are just scared, then. Eventually you won't be." She couldn't know that for sure, but it was worth saying. So it was funny when, as if calling her out on her lie, her cellphone rang.

"Aren't you answering that?" Lorelai asked.

Rory shook her head no; she knew it was Logan. He had been calling her, sparsely at first, but with increased insistency once he realized she was simply not calling back. "Maybe later."

"Why, are you scared of something?"

"No, you are not turning this conversation around! It is you and your wreck of a life we are discussing right now." As Lorelai laughed, her breath slowly found its way back to normalcy, so Rory added with sudden inspiration: "Remember that 1930's play I got you once, like, ten years ago? _The Children's Hour_? By Lillian Hellman?"

"The lesbian one? Hon, I loved the book and your literary taste has no match on the surface of Earth, but what you are suggesting is maybe an extreme solution."

"Mom! I'm trying to be serious here!" Rory took a half-eaten Twinkie from Lorelai's hands and threw it across the kitchen to underline that point. "I remember I saw it sitting there in the bookstore and thought it would speak to your relationship with grandma. You know, there is the whole homophobia thing, but apart from that, I am pretty sure the generational anxieties were the point of the book."

"Yea, those are a bitch. You will know it when your fully-grown child takes away your Twinkie."

"The thing is, you can't go too far the other way," Rory continued, ignoring her child of a mother. "You have already stood your ground and built your life on your own terms, you have already escaped the Children's Hour destiny. You don't have to define your life in opposition to grandma's anymore. You will end up sabotaging yourself this way. If you want to get married, just do it. You are allowed to."

"But hey, you dismissed the lesbian route way too quickly. I am definitely coming around to it."

"Mom! You do remember the lesbian thing ends in suicide, right? You can't just ignore all the 1930's institutional prejudice. Also, and more pertinent to the topic, this is a serious conversation! Be serious for once!"

"But it's hard!"

"No, don't come at me with that baby voice, that is the voice of defeat. I am going to get that book for you and stick it under your nose just to stress that point."

As Rory went into her bedroom and ran her fingers through the bookshelf (and Lorelai continued to moan and complain and pop Twinkies open) her cellphone rang again. This time, she had the reflex to go answer it - but the reflex was muted when she finally spotted _The Children's Hour_ on the shelf. She had bought it with Jess, she remembered, when they went for pizza after he got her basket in some stupid auction. And now there it was, sitting in a little corner too full of Jess to ignore, next to _Howl_ and _The Holy Barbarians_ , books they once read together. They had so much time to read, back then. Things went by so slowly.

She barely noticed it when the cellphone was finally shut up by way of Lorelai throwing it into some kitchen drawer; she only found it there much later, when she was looking for a Twinkie.

\- x -

A day or two after that, her phone was still fighting for attention, buzzing defeatedly inside her purse, forgotten on the passenger's seat. When she was not staring at her bank statement, Rory had been spending an awful lot of time doing exactly what she was doing now: siting in her mother's car, looking around, not sure what to do or where to go, the Jess thing still annoyingly on her mind. She couldn't call him - she had lost his number during the icy year that preceded their last encounter. She couldn't go after him – or could she? It was hard to tell at this point. She sat in her car because it felt like holding a gun or a hammer, like she was sitting on the solution for her problems. The solution, she felt – she knew, the solution was ahead, it was moving forward.

But what did that even mean at this point? Somewhere ahead of her there was the job she was supposed to go after. Somewhere around that same spot was the person she was supposed to choose, to commit to. All of her choices up to that point had brought her to be stuck in the driver's seat, everywhere to go, but still powerless. Hopping from city to city in weirdly unstable jobs, avoiding Logan's calls, keeping Jess away – all of that meant she had succeeded in sabotaging any home she might have outside of Stars Hollow. She had been a tourist outside, she realized, as she stared at the gazebo from the open windows, feeling her mind was maybe melting under the summer heat.

She zipped her coffee and tried to go back to her book once again. I bet not even Zelda Fitzgerald ever messed up this bad, she thought when staring at the cover, and she knew it was a lie - but she felt exactly like Zelda, the troubled woman whose only labor of love, that book, she was holding right now. A woman who came from ridiculous privilege and still found herself lost, with ambitions larger than herself, tossing that hammer from a hand to the other and never hitting anything but her own ass. She opened the book and flipped through its pages, looking for the part she had read last:

 _Being in love, she concluded, is simply the presentation of our pasts to another individual, mostly packages so unwieldy that we can no longer manage the loosened strings alone. Looking for love is like asking for a new point of departure, she thought, another chance in life._

She probably did get a lot of those other chances, but to what effect? Just to keep finding new ways to put her greatest desires out of her reach.

Rory paused for a second. She opened her purse, ignoring a defeated buzz from her cellphone, and got some of her bank documents. She would turn 26 in about three months: almost a whole year of having a trust fund at her disposal, a whole year of having those numbers uselessly stare at her from the paper, so far away from any material reality. Just numbers. A lot of them.

As she stared at those numbers, one thing became clear: they had no place in her vague conjectures for the future, where they always ended up as a mere accessory, as an aimless trip or as an empty house in Nowhere County, CT. They had a place in the business of getting ideas to become real. Kind of like fiction, in that sense. She had always felt like every journalistic effort, every search for an impossible truth was, in a way, an exercise of fiction. Like the one she had to write for herself.

That realization energized her in such a way that she felt like driving in its direction immediately. That was not a very fact-based instinct, though. She had to go home first and begin some heavy research.

As she drove back home, her cellphone kept buzzing. That is ok, she thought. I am handling that plot point eventually. Just not right now.

\- x -

Rory would spend the rest of that year on the road. Her focused wandering would bleed into 2011 – a year in which she would find herself in intersection with Jess' words exactly three times.

After that epiphany in her mother's car, she spent a month furiously doodling and researching and coming out of it increasingly frustrated. She could see the hazy shape of her idea, of her plan in the distance, but it didn't have the clarity she wanted – that she strived for in every single aspect of her life – and despite all of her efforts she couldn't make it happen.

Finally she came to accept the uselessness of waiting any longer. She would have to find that story in the process of writing it.

So she drafted a route with plenty of wiggle room, bought the first half-decent car she could find and just left. For the rest of that year she drove up and down the state, interviewing people and filling notebook after notebook and pilling up mp3 files. In her spare time she drew little covers for the CD cases in which she recorded interviews, all just to give some materiality to her efforts; the drawings were all terrible, but she liked coloring them with her fancy interviewer pens (all possible shades of blue). She didn't have much spare time, anyway. Finding that story consumed pretty much all of her waking hours.

It was a simple equation. She felt the deepest existential dread when she thought about having wasted all that time in D.C.. There was only one possible, retroactive solution: making that time count.

The list of things she knew about wasn't that extensive, she realized with depressed awareness, but it wasn't like it was devoid of merits. She did know an awful lot about terrible 70's sitcoms (including all quotes from _The Brandy Brunch_ spin-off movie) and Russian authors who rose to literary heaven (she counted Marina Tsvetaeva among that group and wouldn't hear otherwise). She also knew, thanks to D.C., everything about the Senate hell that the healthcare bill went through. And thanks to, well, her entire life, she knew all there was to know about the spirit of small, quirky Connecticut towns.

So she made her decision. What changed in the lives of small-town people since the bill had passed - that was a story she could tell like no one else could. She needed a hook, though, and when New Year's caught her still on the road, she decided she needed to go through all that material, re-read all of her interviews with crazy townspeople across the state, and find the angle to her story. Only one more town, she kept saying. Only one more crazy town meeting, foreign and yet so familiar.

It was late February when she got home – six whole months. After hugging her mother for half an hour, all she wanted was to have pancakes and a giant cup of coffee at Luke's - the biggest cup of coffee known to man. To man, maybe, but not to women, at least not Gilmore women.

She found herself back at Luke's two weeks later, when the boxes were once again being carried out of her childhood room. It was a bit worrying that she kept coming back to Stars Hollow, again and again, never quite settled elsewhere. She hoped this time it was for real, she hoped she would finally fix her life. She was running through her trust fund money a bit too eagerly; she couldn't stop herself from renting a place that was a bit too nice in New York City; she had to sit, finish that piece, her masterpiece, her swan song, and put it out there. And then go after something that would make some real money.

Rory thought about all that as she spread herself on Luke's couch, over the diner, in an attempt to get away from what she hoped would be her last stress-filled loading of a moving truck. Her mother was happy to boss the moving people around in her name.

She was going to read her own book, but then another one caught her eye. It was needlessly cluttering the underused kitchen counter; someone had left it there and Luke hadn't noticed.

Jess had left it there, she corrected herself. She was avoiding his name but there was no way around it right now. She took the book in her hands: it was _The Beautiful and Damned_. F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Her thoughts went back to the book she was reading when she decided, like a madwoman, that she would run aimlessly around the state: _Save Me the Waltz,_ by Zelda Fitzgerald. She was F. Scott's lover, and each of them was the ruin of the other. All of a sudden it became clear, the weight Jess had in that decision.

So she took the book and read it until the sun went down, and after that, and a little bit after that. Jess was keeping conspicuously silent: his usual mess of folded pages and unintelligible, cryptic notes in the margins was nowhere to be found. But she did find a trace of him, the first words she got from him since they had that senseless fight - through Fitzgerald's words, underlined with anger:

 _It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream._

That was the first small intersection. And it stung.

The second intersection came on the Fourth of July, as had become a habit: a death by a thousand cuts, through each one of those days of blind celebration. She had a massive hangover the day after the party; she had been stuck in the process of writing her supposed magnum opus for months; she felt like crap, ant there was little to do about it but to wish her present looks were better than her present feelings. She was walking to Luke's when she spotted Jess inside, from what she hoped was a safe distance.

It wasn't, tough. He turned around before Rory could even adjust the focus on her eyeballs. Right after his eyes got that glow of recognition, he reached for something with his right hand. Her thoughts raced through ideas of door knobs and door bells and an overwhelming instinct on his part of walking towards her.

It was nothing of the sort, of course. What he reached for was the back of a woman, who looked back at him and smiled with an ease that Rory never had.

She couldn't tell exactly when the third and final intersection finally made its way to him, but she got to it almost immediately. She went straight home and fished the Zelda Fitzgerald book out of where it was forgotten the year before. _Save Me the Waltz._

It was not outside the realm of possibility that she would have thrown the book on Jess' face had he still been around. But by the time she got back to Luke's, he and his proverbial girlfriend were gone. So Rory climbed the stairs to the apartment without asking for permission and left the book there, exactly where she had found that other one. And carefully, with a weird sense of profanation for scarring a book like that, she underlined a single sentence:

 _We couldn't go on indefinitely being swept off our feet._

She knew he would read it, and she hoped it would sting.

\- x -

The countdown to 2012 found Rory breathing again, in a rooftop in New York City. Only God knows where it found Jess, she thought for a moment, before rushing down the stairs to meet Logan and hoping he wouldn't be too mad she took off for so long.

That party was work, after all, and Logan had gone to great lengths to make it so. Rory's swan song got published by a major publication just in time for it to make some waves before Christmas break and Congress recess. It was just the kind of local, authentic, real-America flavored story the liberal-leaning media was craving in the wake of Obamacare. Now Logan had pulled all his contacts, his whole book, so she could show herself off and get some recognition smiles and some business cards. Not everybody had read the piece, but a good number of them had heard of it, and that was more than enough to make the leap. Since the publication, she had scored a good number of freelance jobs. Looks like I am back on that front, she though. It was going well, though, so she couldn't really complain.

"Is this overwhelming you?" Logan asked, in a quieter moment after the New Year's cheering, the New Year's kiss, and the weird New Year's handshakes. "I know you hate this kind of thing."

"Oh, Logan, no, not at all. This is amazing, all of this. This year has already started so much better than my last ones. No, scratch that, it is exponentially better. Mushroomingly better, in fact- "

"You ramble extra-hard when you are uncomfortable." Logan smiled, interrupting her rant.

"I do, don't I?" Rory let her shoulders down, defeated. "But this is important."

It really was, and there was Logan. Steadily, lovingly pushing her in the direction of normalcy. She could never say he had ever let her stay still, at least when he was close enough to her; he had waited for her to come back from her crazy re-run of an _On the Road_ -like journalistic project (pursuit might be a better word) - and now he was calmly guiding her back to the world he knew. The world she knew, too.

Though, had he really waited? She supposed it would depend on the definition she chose for the concept. When she finally answered his calls she had already decided to go through with her fixed idea of a story; he didn't respond well to not being consulted. _I guess we never really talked about us this time around,_ he had said, and it was true. _So I don't really have any say on being apart from you for so long,_ he had said, and she didn't want him to feel this way – but it was true. So he said _, maybe we can see other people for a while_. He was as clear and honest as always and his problem-solving way of thinking saw no issue with that arrangement. He was still there for her for all of that crazy previous year, like he had learned how so long ago – and Rory felt her heartbeat calm down around him, now she was feeling better about her life. It was good.

Though they hadn't really talked about them this time around either.

She shook that though off and gave him a kiss, feeling at peace for being around his doubtless determination. She felt like having a toast with him, and the one she came up with surprised even herself:

" _Here's to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life_ ", she said, "for making this important night pretty easy. And here's to you too."

Logan smiled that provoking smile of his. "Where did that come from?"

It came from that damn F. Scott Fitzgerald's book, Rory realized, and suddenly she was annoyed. What was it doing in her head at a time like that?

"Oh, I don't know", was the answer she could give; she did feel the quote matched her feelings. "It is this night, I guess. This beautiful damned night."

\- x -

Nearly six months later, on early June, Rory would find herself again at a high-brow party full of snobby journalists, again thanking alcohol for coloring that awful night with slightly rosed tones. _I'll have to double my alcohol intake, and that is just for starters,_ was all Rory could think. This was so much harder without Logan around. Or her mother. Or really anyone.

It all began that same New Year's night, nearly six months before, when Rory was eating her face off by the buffet and overheard in passing the magic word: Livingston.

That very same January 1st, still lying in the bed by Logan's side in the morning, she looked up the Livingston Award. It was open for submissions – it had been for months, really. She didn't realize it before because she had always thought the award was way out of her league. _The Pulitzer for the young_ , they called it – the Livingston was for journalists who were 35 or younger. _It is incredibly prestigious,_ Rory kept thinking, the allure she felt painfully obvious; _my piece would be judged by superstars, legends, demigods among journalists._ Ellen Goodman. Clarence Page. Anna Quindlen.

Hell, she realized, feeling her gut sink in anticipation. Her piece would be judged by Christiane fucking Amanpour.

She poked a sound asleep Logan, incapable of containing herself.

"Can I make it?" she asked. "Is there a tiny, little, inconspicuous chance that I wouldn't embarrass myself by trying?"

Logan was as supportive as he had always been since he learned how. As far as he was concerned she would blow Christiane's socks away and wipe the floor with the other submissions. Rory, telling him to climb down the hyperbole train, felt her gut vortex lose a little bit of its pull. She didn't quite believe him, though: all of January was still spent with tests to Logan's skills in reassuring her, as she tried to convince herself she could do it.

It was February 1st, and it was also five exact minutes before the final deadline, when Rory finally submitted her piece. She never told anyone but Logan. She didn't want to be any more embarrassed than necessary when the inevitable failure came her way.

So she was honestly, absolutely, thoroughly motherfucking surprised when the little notification came, after a hazy month of crippling anxiety. It was April 1st, which didn't make it any easier to believe. But after a few days she had to accept the truth: she was a finalist. Her piece had been in Christiane Amanpour's goddess hands and somehow it had not been immediately thrown into a trash can.

 _I knew you could do it,_ Logan told her, and she could tell he really believed it. When the date was set for the award ceremony, Rory invited him before anyone else – she had guilty thoughts of her mother, but realized their relationship had become a little harder. For pure, distilled fear of causing disappointing, the mere fact of Rory being a contender was kept from Lorelai - which did not go by unnoticed.

"I thought that by having squeezed you out my body I had automatically called shotgun for all of your future endeavors, squeezing-related or otherwise."

"Mom…"

"I'm just trying to get a sense of the rules here."

"You still have shotgun, always, OK? You are the first in my thank-you speech. I'll read it for the whole town if I don't win, so you can hear it and marvel at your prominent shotgunness. I'll stand on top of the diner's counter and do it."

"Oh please, do it even after you win. And no taking off your shoes to step on the counter. I want the full Luke meltdown for this one."

"By the way, he is coming, right?"

"Of course, hon. I mean, we have that Bahamas trip planned, but we are already fitting everything into the plans. We might go straight from Bimini to New York, so I'll have that Hemingway glow all over me, which can be good or bad, depending on the crowd's literary taste."

"Oh, yea," Rory frowned at the thought of the author and the years he lived in a hotel in Bimini, fishing, thinking of writing _The Old Man and The Sea._ The idea made her uncomfortable for some reason. "So, you sound excited. Things are good between you guys?"

"So good. I feel like we are in synch right now. Luke has been guessing my breakfast mood every single day. Last week he got it all right, down to the exact amount of blueberries in the pancakes, without me having to say a word."

"And, well…" Rory hoped her mother would take the hint, but since she didn't, a direct question was called for. "Did you bring up that subject? The one involving knees bending, bells ringing and whatnot?"

"Oh, well," Lorelei paused. "No, I didn't, no. I don't want to ruin things right now, you know? We are finally taking a real trip, and he is not even extra-grumpy about it, just regular grumpy. He already let me call shotgun (or window gun?) for the plane ride - unlike certain people."

Rory accepted the diss with that little guilt she had been feeling, but right now, there was no changing things. Logan had been there for her in a ridiculous degree, so he had received the first slice of that cake.

In the end, all that was good for was making it all harder when he chose not to eat it.

It happened a mere two weeks before the ceremony, in the middle of May. Rory had been a trainwreck for two whole months, shaking with anxiety, unable to get any work done. She had been sleeping at Logan's place in NYC a lot more frequently than she thought was healthy, especially with his long stays in London, but it made her feel better, so she leaned on him and on the general reminders of his presence.

So one day he came through the door, straight from the airport, and Rory was waiting for him, having given up on making any progress with her current freelance job. He had barely sat down when she began pouring her anxiety on him, talking so fast she would have got a tongue cramp if such a thing were even possible. But even in the midst of all that self-absorption, Rory had to realize Logan was not his normal self. He was unresponsive and cold, his mind was elsewhere. So she finally asked, after a long-ass pause to breath in some courage:

"What is up with you, Logan? Did something happen?" She tried to sound soft and concerned, though what she really felt was mild annoyance. "I know I've been sounding like a Saturday morning re-run of the same episode for a few weeks now, but you usually sit patiently through it."

He breathed in deeply; the right words seemed lost on him, something that did not happen often – or ever. When he finally spoke, his voice was somber and almost metallic:

"There is something we need to talk about. I didn't want this conversation to be so sudden, but I heard some news on the way here and… well, things have changed."

Rory didn't think she had room for any new kind of anxiety, and yet, there it was. She tried to sound collected. "Shoot, then."

"I have been seeing someone. In London." Oh, right. Straight to the gut. No need to smooth it over.

"Well, OK." She was so mature now. So adult. She could handle this. She was not a teenager anymore. "The last time we talked about it, that was our arrangement. I figured something like this would have been happening. Maybe we can talk about it now- "

"No, Rory, listen. It is getting serious. There is a lot at stake."

"I don't think I follow." That was a huge, massive understatement. But she was still doing the calm and collected thing.

"I didn't want it to happen like this." His voice sounded shaken for a second, miracle of miracles. "I don't know what to say. She is from France, she is an heiress. It was only a matter of time before some jerk with a camera spotted us, and it finally happened. I couldn't bear the thought of you finding out through a third-rate gossip magazine cover, so I had to tell you."

"Logan…"

"You know you are something special, Ace. But like I said, there is a lot at stake right now."

Hearing him call her "Ace" made something click. Rory got up. She didn't cry while getting her purse; she didn't bother grabbing her tooth brush or the rest of her stuff; she did, however, reach for the drawer where the invitations for the award ceremony were carefully kept. Once they were safe in her purse, all she wanted to reach for was the door.

"Ace- " Logan reached for her, and she reached for the door knob. "Listen to me. I don't want it to end like this. Or at all."

Rory had little emotion in her voice when she said: "You don't seem to have much room for accommodations."

"I do, for you. You should know that. It is not like we have been moving in the direction I wanted us to, anyway. This is different, but we can make it work."

"How, though?"

"Somehow."

 _Is that enough?_ , Rory kept thinking while walking down those Upper East Side streets, drinking an overpriced cup of coffee, holding the ceremony tickets – wondering whether she would be back soon, or ever.

\- x -

The next two weeks were chaos. Rory leaned on Lane like she hadn't done in years, all through expensive long-distance calls with different area codes every other day - Hep Alien had a small tour, sometimes David Bowie covers in smoky pubs, sometimes playing Christian rock in church basements. Lane was as lovingly supportive as ever, but between the tour and her kids, she did not have time to breath, much less to get all the way down to New York. She would spend a good ten minutes apologizing for that every time they talked, and one could only imagine that her practice as a mother to a couple of five-year-olds had perfected her skills in dealing with emotionally regressed grown-ups. For that, Rory was grateful, since it was precisely her case.

A few days before the ceremony, though, Rory was requiring toddler-level emotional support. Lorelai had called to say the tropical storm Beryl had downed power and telephone lines all over the Bahamas. It wasn't as bad over there in Bimini, she and Luke were safe, but the rain was still crazy and for all intents and purposes they were trapped at the island. _This is not happening,_ Rory kept thinking. Yes, it was selfish and awful of her, but since she learned her mother was safe, all her attention was sucked by the pure, unadulterated panic creeping in. She would have to march into that ceremony alone. _This is not happening_. She was still in that panicked state even after Lorelai promised to call every 15 minutes.

Every single name ran through her head. Paris? Out of the country. Her father? Yea, right. Her grandparents? They were coming for the announcement of the winners, but Richard had an enormously important, Czech-related business meeting, so they would miss the first part of the party - the part where she would meet people and shake hands, introduce herself and try not to sweat too hard in her designer dress. Rory was sure that, had she asked, her grandparents would blow anything and anybody to please her, but she didn't want to feel guilty on top of deadly anxious. So she faced the facts. _I'm going alone_.

 _Alone_ , was the word in her head, as the big day arrived and she spent all morning changing her mind about jewelry, straightening her hair, curling it up and then straightening it again, climbing in all the heels she owned and then throwing them across the room. She was finally ready, having exhausted all possible aesthetic combinations and options, and the ceremony was still hours away. It was too much time to think, too much time to drown in anxiety.

Too much time to make great mistakes.

She glanced at the Fitzgeralds' books in her shelf. Jess' number was lost, there was nothing she could do about it. Even if she did have his number, how would she go about it _? I know the last time we saw each other I almost made you chop off your finger, and I know it was two years ago. But please, come see me._ Yea, that is not happening.

Except it did. She found Truncheon's number, she tried to help herself, she failed, and she called - and he wasn't there. That's the universe stopping me from being stupid, she thought. But the universe had little regard for her self-preservation.

"He is in New York for a book signing thing. I can give you his number, just wait a minute."

Stupid Matthew (she knew it had to be Matthew). Before she could say anything, the number was in her hands. All she had to do was call. Would he come, though? Had he ever? In what universe was that even a possibility? What made her think he would come?

 _And yet, he will,_ was all she could think as she called his number.

He didn't answer. He didn't want to talk to her. That much was clear. _Hang this up right now, Rory. Just hang this up._

She didn't. "I know the last time we saw each other I almost made you chop off your finger, and I know it was two years ago", she said to the machine. "But please, come see me. You would understand what I'm going through. The gravitational pull in your stomach when someone else reads your words".

Right after hanging up, it became impossible to sit still. _This is not happening,_ Rory kept thinking, _I didn't just do that._ Why did she have to pile up humiliation on top of humiliation like that? It was enough that her being a finalist was probably a typo or something. Now she would have to picture Jess' smugness while listening to her message, for the rest of the night and possibly for the rest of her life.

She went through every outfit once again before deciding, to hell with being fashionably late. She took a cab and got to the party before pretty much anyone else. She helped the waiters carry some trays. She hid in the bathroom when people started to arrive. She faced how lame she must be looking there, all alone in the middle of the increasingly crowded room. She had just decided to leave when Jess appeared in a corner, wearing a suit jacket over his jeans and smiling with smugness, yes, but also with sweetness in his dark eyes.

\- x -

So that was how Rory found herself thanking alcohol for its blessed existence a few hours later. She and Jess had some small talk over shrimp cocktails – "Congrats, this is amazing." "How is Truncheon going?" – and before long fell into an awkward silence.

"So," Rory began, in an even awkwarder attempt to keep some sort of conversation happening. "Where did you get the jacket?"

"Borrowed it from some guy. Sorry for the jeans, though. In all fairness, it is not like you gave me advanced notice."

"True. But it's OK. You actually look nice."

"You look nice too." He looked down at his shoes as he said that, and she took another look at him.

"Aren't you gonna apologize for the Chucks?"

"You Gilmores always ask for too much," he laughed. It was true; he was even wearing a somewhat loose skinny tie that matched his red Chuck Taylors. "If you didn't notice, my previous apology was pretty unenthusiastic already."

"I did notice," she laughed too. "Don't get me wrong, this is plenty. I can't believe I actually got you inside some kind of formal wear."

"Yea, me neither," was all he answered. Rory blushed, which, of course, was bound to happen soon anyway – but that was different. It was painfully evident that they were both thinking about the last time she tried to get him into a tux – senior year in high school, for prom - and that was a little much to take in while in the middle of that snobbish crowd, chewing expensive shrimp, trying not to stare at each other for too long.

Rory was about to say something, anything, to break that silence, when her cellphone rang. It was Lorelai, offering support and a reminder of her networking-building duties, once every 15 minutes, as promised. "Oh, sorry."

"No problem," Jess mumbled, walking away in the direction of alcohol. Rory soon realized that was the best idea and made her way back to him, squeezing a few wrinkled chief-editor hands before getting there. The process repeated itself a few times, so a full hour passed before they could both settle at a table for a few minutes and go some steps past the small talk.

"So, your piece was great. Really good." As Rory blushed and shook her head, Jess continued, more incisively: "No, really. I thought I couldn't take any more damn saccharine takes on health care reform, but you made it interesting. A whole new take on the topic."

"Oh, come on, it is kind of dull for you. It is just 15 thousand words on Stars Hollow-like towns and all of their Star Hollowness."

"Well, yes, I did wonder how you made it through so many town meetings in a row."

"I guess if Taylor presided all of them, I wouldn't have."

"If Taylor presided all of them, you'd be dead and buried."

"True," Rory laughed, the champagne tickling her nose. It was weird to see Jess drink from those flute-shaped glasses; he was emptying them out in single gulps. Champagne probably wasn't his drink of choice.

"I have to say, I feel so normal next to you," he continued, resting the glass, leaning in her direction. "I would even say I envy you, but I have seen you shake too many old white dudes' hands tonight to say it with a straight face. Still, you are the one living the _Holy Barbarians_ life, going on the road and all that."

"Oh my God, now I want to read that book again!" Rory's laugh was bright; she was back in that bench near the gazebo, telling Jess about the Lawrence Lipton book she was reading, using it as a bargain tool to get him to attend a Friday Night Dinner.

"I still have your copy, you know," he smiled crookedly.

"You do?" Seeing him nod yes behind a new glass of champagne, she punched him lightly in the arm, making him spill a little of it. "I can't believe you! It took me years to finally get another copy after you stole mine!"

"I did not steal it! It was a legitimate commercial transaction, if I recall correctly."

"It was extortion and a shameless theft, that is what it was."

"Now that is not very Beatnik of you, is it? All this sudden respect for private property? Not so Holy Barbarian anymore."

"Oh, shut up!" She smiled, and then blushed slightly when she remembered the original bargain for the book involved a kiss. Maybe he remembered it too, because he really did shut up for a second. Those thoughts became too much, so Rory passionately tried to continue the conversation. "Anyway, I don't stand a chance against you when it comes to Holy Barbarianess and being a Beatnik. You are already eyeballs-deep in autobiographical fiction and alcoholism- "

"I feel so judged right now," he interrupted her while finishing up a glass.

"- and naked people in theaters, and raw, unadulterated labors of creativity, and reaching for the darkest little corners of the human psyche. That kind of thing."

"I can't tell whether this is meant to be praise or if you are just mocking me to my face."

"I mean it!" She was maybe getting carried away, but she was still shaking a little inside for having him there, for having called and having him answer. She felt moved, and grateful, and, weirdly, a little guilty. "If I didn't know you were out there living the Beatnik life, I don't think I would have found the courage to hop on smelly buses and sleep on shady motels over a pale idea for a story."

"Come on, now," he deflected, without accepting the acknowledgement she was trying to give him. Why did he have to be like that? "The whole point of _The Holy Barbarians_ was that the Beat movement was as much about politics as it was about art and literature and stuff. You are the one who went eyeballs-deep in politics."

"Yea, but you are the one who actually lived in Venice Beach, like Lawrence Lipton."

"Yea, and look how well that turned out."

"I would say pretty well. It got you where you are today." Since he snorted sarcastically, and since she sensed all that alcohol had cleared her way, she added: "It got you your girlfriend."

"Not for much longer, though."

"What?"

"Well, I think after today she probably decided she was kidding herself. She said, 'wherever you are going, it can't possibly be more important than this'. She is probably right, and yet, here I am, so… You know. Whatever."

"Than 'this'? 'This' what?"

"The stupid book signing."

"Wait… it was _your book's_ signing?"

"Yea. It has been picking up some steam, the last one. It is nice and all, but-"

"Oh my god, Jess! Stupid Matthew didn't tell me it was your book! I would never, Jesus, I really wouldn't have called you…"

"It is OK, Rory, really. I hate these things. But Elise couldn't understand it this time, the concept of me wanting to be somewhere else. Then again, maybe she is right. Whatever."

"I'm sorry - Elise?"

"My girlfriend. The one you brought up."

"Oh. You never told me her name."

"Well, you never asked."

It was true. She never did.

"It was kind of rude of you, really," Jess added, smirking.

"I guess it was," Rory answered, slowly, "but now that you mention it, it makes some sense."

"How so?"

"Yea, well." She tilted her head and looked at him - at his dark eyes and at his now longer hair, at his hands, closed in fists and resting on the table - realizing something as the words came out. "Maybe it's just my self-centeredness, but I never wanted to ask you questions if the answer is something I can't own, or claim. I think it is just that I don't want any part of you that can't somehow be mine."

Was that too much? Probably, it was probably too much. The silence that came after that was uncomfortable and sore; they were both looking down, afraid to touch the raw flesh Rory had just unceremoniously poked. This went on for the longest time - until her phone started buzzing again.

"Oh, uhm…" Why did Lorelai had to choose that exact day to be so damn punctual?

"Yea, you should definitely answer that." He gestured with his head, meaning no direction in particular - meaning, "just go". When Rory came back, of course, he was nowhere to be found.

\- x -

It took a while before she thought of looking for him up on the roof. The hesitation that came by those final steps was brutal, but she walked right through it. She would not allow him to walk away from her, not after all it had cost them to meet in the first place.

"Thought I would maybe find you here."

Jess looked back with an unsure expression, then took off his earbuds. He had been leaning against the parapet, watching the street below, covered in cigarette smoke. The earbuds were screaming at an unreasonably loud volume.

"Like I said, I am no Rory Gilmore. You can usually find me at the same old places."

She leaned by his side. "It's been a while since I've seen you smoke."

"I tried to quit for a while. Be healthier, eat less meat. But lately I'm thinking, screw that, I probably have a few more years before my insides begin to rot."

"I've missed all this sunshine you bring when you enter the room." He laughed, and Rory felt alarmed with all the sincerity she was allowing to bleed through her words. Jess was still undecipherable, though he was now smiling a slightly crooked smile that made her head feel lighter than all the night's champagne had managed to.

"If I weren't so used to your sarcasm I might have thrown myself from this roof after being snapped like that."

"Said Mr. Earnestness." Jess laughed like he was saying 'fair enough'. "What is it about you and roofs, anyway?"

"I like them," he said, looking up through the smoke. "It feels like there is no way out but to fly."

She took that in. "I would never have thought of it like that. Though I suppose I learned to appreciate the openness over the years."

"I can tell."

There was a little silence, the traffic filling the air completely, before he added: "I noticed you read my book. _The Beautiful and Damned._ "

"I did, yes. It was just sitting there. Asking for it, really."

"Way to blame the victim."

"Well, what you gonna do."

He took a drag of his cigarette. "I was wondering whether you liked it."

"I was not planning on admitting it. But yes."

"What was it that you liked?" He looked at her as he asked that, and his smile was more crooked than ever. _Damned dead nerve endings_ , was all she could think about.

"There was a scene with Anthony and Gloria that struck a chord with me. How did it go again?" She breathed in. " _He was handsome then if never before, bound for one of those moments_ … no _, immortal moments which_ … uhm…"

 _"…_ _which come so radiantly that their remembered brightness…"_

".. No, it was light! _That their remembered light_ _is enough to see by for years_ ," she remembered. "Some sunshine right there. Probably."

"Probably." He positively blushed, but Rory felt too dizzy to brag about it.

"I liked how F. Scott stressed that _his dark eyes were gleaming,_ right before that. He had an eye for the important stuff." What was she even doing? Didn't she remember the way they had left things? He surely did, he made it clear. But there was nothing she could do – she was too overwhelmed. Too relieved for being away from the crowd downstairs. Way too moved by his mere presence.

"I'd have to agree," he said, now without looking at her. "That was the whole reason I cut the roof scene from my lame play."

"I did miss that scene! Why did you cut it?"

"I could never find the right person to play the woman on the roof." When he noticed her confused look, he added: "Nobody had the right eyes. Never quite as blue."

Rory straightened herself when she heard that. For the amount of time she had spent coming up with ways to describe exactly how dark his eyes were, she would never have thought…

"It's like Fitzgerald said," he interrupted her thinking. " _She was beautiful – but especially she was without mercy._ "

After that, she wanted him to look at her. To look at her and say it again. She was about to physically make him – but then he popped his bubble of evasiveness in the worst possible way.

"I do wish we'd got to have a chance in the real world, you know."

"You think we never had it?"

"I'm pretty sure we are incapable of it."

"Not even in Chicago? Wasn't that you taking us into the real world?"

"Not at all. That felt like a dream sequence." He took another drag, the deepest drag a human person could take out of a cigarette, and his dark eyes went missing behind the smoke. "I had no intention of inviting you, of showing up like that. I swear I was gonna take Elise. She was not my girlfriend at the time, though she was around. But then I couldn't. I kept thinking about that one time you visited me in here, in New York. We went to that record store and I took home a Bloody Valentine CD. Turning around in Washington Park and seeing you there… I really wanted that thrill again. It's lame, I know, but still."

That was when she decided to hold him up for saying that. It was too much, they would soon break that small suspension of disbelief, that microcosm of oblique sincerity. So it might was well be Rory the one to break it.

"Jess, why are you like this?"

"You ask me that a lot," he said, back at the evasive thing. She tried to make him look at her:

"I just feel so nostalgic around you, I swear. I just… I go back to that feeling of being locked in your orbit. I want to talk about us, I want to reminisce into the night, I want to hear you say what you just said. And now I am doing it, because I want it so bad, and yet, there is not that much to talk about. To want that thrill again…. is not enough."

"I know," was all he said.

"You could have been everything to me. You should have been. All of my sweetest memories should have been yours."

"I know."

"You could have been the first person I ever had sex with. You could have come to New Haven with me, you could have taken me to prom. You would have hated the prom and the tux, sure, but we would talk about it now, and it would feel good, and I would know what slice of my life belongs to you, even if it is all in the past. The way it is, I just don't know a damn thing, you just-"

"I was too busy, Rory," he said through his teeth. "I wanted to be everything to you. I did. I was just too busy being nothing to myself."

As Rory paused, he went on, piercing a hole in her tearful rant:

"Also, I would not have hated taking you to prom. It would've been lame as fuck, that's obvious, but I had all kinds of plans."

"You did?"

"I did, yes. I would've gotten into the stupid tux, like you wanted, and I would've brought you one of those stupid wrist things with a huge-ass flower on it. I would have made it through the awful Stars Hollow High musical taste, but when it were all over and everybody left, I would've taken you for a ride in my car, maybe we would've had eaten something, and I would stop somewhere far away from everything. And we would have our own slow dance, to music that wouldn't make our ears bleed."

Rory had never heard that many words come out of his mouth at once. _That will do for a memory,_ she thought. _That is almost enough_.

"What was your choice? Of a song, I mean. To keep our ears from bleeding."

He smiled, and she saw some relief behind those sharp angles.

"Maybe something like this." He took a moment, then stepped forward, and Rory realized she was holding her breath. He got dangerously close, reaching for her hair – for her ear, actually. He was sharing his earbuds with her. Then his hands went down her back, finally settling by her waist; he pulled her a little closer, and she heard some Radiohead song playing, softly, a deep voice reverberating through what seemed to be the whole night sky:

 _I don't wanna be your friend; I just wanna be your lover._

 _No matter how it ends,_

 _no matter_

 _how it starts._

They were being so direct that night - for their standards, anyway. Rory had a moment of hesitation, almost like shifting back gears, before she chose to put both her hands behind Jess' neck. She was holding her own hands at first, but she slowly let go, resting them against his skin, feeling the elastic stiffness underneath. He slowly pulled her even closer, enough to have both his hands at her back; they still didn't touch all that much, though. There was still something invisible standing between their bodies. Rory tripped a bit, her high heels bumping against his Chucks as they moved in what could only be described as the slowest dance ever danced in the whole history of humanity. It was barely a dance, really; it was more of an excuse to look into each other's eyes like they would have when they were teenagers in love and time was slow.

"Sorry", Rory said, almost whispering, when she stepped in his foot. He didn't even register it. _He wants to kiss me,_ she realized _._ _He won't though_. He had always been like this, pushing her to the limit and then just pulling back and waiting. Why? _You have too much faith in me_ , she wanted to say. _Too much confidence in my ability to make the leap._

She tripped as they took steps in opposite directions and he gave her that crooked smile, holding her so she wouldn't fall. _Forget about your house of cards,_ the song said. In that precarious position, her center of gravity lost, Rory felt she could do it. She could make the leap. She could give him the sign he was waiting for.

But she didn't, and soon they were standing straight again, and the song was over. There was that powerful nostalgia for the prom that didn't happen, for the lost kids they once were, and for all that could have been; all else drifted away as Rory's cellphone rang once again, from her forgotten purse lying on the floor. It wasn't Lorelai this time.

"My grandparents are here," she informed him with a weak voice. "It is so late. Oh god, I have to go downstairs, they are about to get started with the important part."

"Yea, you should go. I'll be down in a minute," Jess said from the parapet, against which he'd gone back to leaning in the same defensive position from before.

"Aren't you…"

"Your grandparents are not the only ones arriving, you know."

Rory didn't quite understand but, through her anxiety, she understood she really had to go. She was making her way to the door, slowly and dizzly, when his voice filled the open space between them one last time.

"Rory," he called her, with the same urgency he always had in his voice when he called her name. "I'll fly for you, if you'll love me."

It was Zelda Fitzgerald, she realized. _Save Me the Waltz_. He had read her book after all, and maybe it indeed had stung.

"Fly, then," she answered, feeling the blood flow away from her fingertips.

"I can't fly," Jess said, opening his arms, opening his dark eyes. "But love me anyway."

"Poor wingless child!" Rory continued, bounded to Zelda's words.

"Is it so hard to love me?"

"Do you think you are easy, my illusive possession?"

He smiled, his lips crooked, his eyes watery and weirdly decipherable. Then he turned his back on her, lighting another cigarette, going back to watching the street. The cellphone in her hand buzzed angrily, and Rory knew she had to go downstairs right now - they were beginning to call the winners and local reporting was first. So that was what she did.

And she didn't win. But her name was mentioned, and Logan showed up to hold her hand through that little frustration. _Of course he made his way in,_ Rory realized. The lack of an invitation would never have stopped him. He pleaded to talk to her and she said, _sure. Just not today._ The elder Gilmores were pleased to see him, and Rory still leaned on him when they left the party, her feet sore from all the walking around in heels.

She had seen it from the stage when Jess left, without a goodbye, as was his habit. She wondered whether he would go back to his book signing. Whether he would go back to quit smoking, and to eating less meat – whether he would go back to Elise. She knew he should, and it stung the most. Those thoughts bugged her deeply as she let herself get carried through the days by routine and general inertia, as she buried herself in work again, as her life violently but surely made its way back to normal.

 _She was without mercy,_ Jess said. What did he mean by that?

As the days passed, then weeks, and none of them gathered the strength to call, it was clear how final their dance had been - a little wave on the surface of time that had finally passed by. There was no way forward; there was only going backwards, to the sweet memory they sewed over the hole in their past. _No real world for us. We are incapable of it._

Still, Rory did get her hands back on that Zelda Fitzgerald book, sometime in those four years that passed until she saw him again. There it was, the sentence she had awkwardly underlined; by its side, on the margins, Jess had made his stinging observation:

 _She is more sentimental than me,_ were his words. _So it serves me right, to suffer a bit longer._


	6. Chronicle of a (Love) Foretold

Had he talked to her at all at the wedding? Well, yes. It was the only way to explain her smell being so fresh in his memory right now. Or maybe he was going crazy, his senses were rebellious even. Not surprising, considering the fucking hangover tearing his skull apart.

Yea, that was probably it.

Jess sat up in the bed and realized he had slept in the apartment over the diner. Apparently he did not make it to his mother's many couches the night before. Better this way, that house gave him goosebumps, and he liked Doula enough not to want to go all drunk older brother around her. Though if she was anything like him, she was already approaching that problem age - at least her mother was less of a wackjob than she had been when he was growing up.

He checked his memory, or at least the scraps of it he could find _. Pretty sure I didn't throw up._ For all his faults, he could still hold his liquor. So that's something.

He finally got off the bed, his head spinning and the room full of colorful blinking spots. The smell was there still, all around. He knew it was hers, it was not the kind of thing he was ever able to forget. The very same smell that was all around her princess bedroom, the day he met her.

He almost regretted opening the window that day. First because the night wind got in and blew a little of that smell away, even though it was pretty much a part of that bedroom full of books and stuffed animals, full of dissonance and fragility.

Second, and more importantly, because he asked her to jump out the window with him and she answered no.

Not that it mattered, anyway. Not like they had talked much, or at all, for what, four years?

But the smell was still there, and it annoyed him, so he went downstairs to find something to eat.

As he made his way through some party leftovers he found around the diner's kitchen, Jess tried to make his way through last night's wedding.

Luke looked good and unprecedentedly comfortable in a suit. He would do anything to make Lorelai happy, and it made him happy too, enough that he would sometimes forget to complain. Jess once called him a golden retriever for that, but now he was older and knew better. If he ever wrote a sequel to that first book, he would paint a more forgiving picture of the Luke stand-in and his love life.

As soon as he thought it, Jess shook all of it out of his head. He didn't like to think about the books he didn't yet write. Short stories, little novellas, forewords for other people's books, even newspaper columns, yes, he had been writing plenty of those, but his third novel was stuck in the opening chapters for fucking years now. That was unacceptable. Sure, it was fun to write those smaller pieces in sudden bursts of inspiration or over a few sleepless nights full of beer and sometimes benzedrine, and it was fun to bind books all afternoon, to choose how many raised bands would go in this spine or that, to draw something weird for the flyleaf. But none of that even compared to the calculated thrill of writing a novel, to that unique mix of craft and madness that made him feel high.

Plus, two was a bad number. Two had no rhythm. He needed a third novel so the beats would fall into place.

All of that went through his head as he stuffed his mouth with pigs-in-a-blanket, feeling mildly sick still and wishing to think of anything else. So he went back to his recollections of the day before.

 _I remember sitting far away from everybody._ The sun was high, the ceremony was quick and the town square was full of flowers and the like. It was kind of warm and kind of uncomfortable, so Jess had skipped the beer and gone straight to the whiskey. That much he remembered.

People still looked funny at him from time to time in that town. Seriously, fuck those weirdos. But he was in an OK mood that day, and didn't pay much more attention to it.

Rory came by to say hello and she looked nice - even beautiful. She looked so adult these days. She was a different person. That was probably a good thing.

The music was definitely good, Lane hadn't lost the hang of it.

It was dark soon and soon the elder town weirdos began to go home. For some reason though Jess didn't feel like bailing yet. How much whiskey did he have already? Probably a lot, because they were already out. Whatever. There's beer somewhere, he figured.

Lane chose some moody White Stripes song to kickstart the slow dances. _You've got her in your pocket, and there's no way out now._ He almost got up and told her not to ruin the cool he was keeping at not a small cost, but he liked that song.

He did not bring a date. Was that weird? Pretty sure he was supposed to bring a date. Well, it was not like he cared what he was supposed to do. Still, it made him think of Elise. Sometimes he missed her like crazy. _I'll miss you terribly, I miss you already_ , he told her the day they parted ways. It was Hemingway _, The Garden of Eden_. She couldn't tell and thought he made that up in the spot; he didn't, but it was true nonetheless. She had been with him through some dark times, she held his hand, she even went cold turkey with him once when things got out of hand. She forgave that one time he cheated, that messy episode in that messy New Year's. It was good for a while after that, but one day she realized it was hopeless, even if it never happened again; there would always be that corner of his heart and his mind annoyingly insisting to belong to someone else. That day she had to go and, even though she relapsed a few times, ultimately she went cold turkey and let go of him for good. Just to think of that made him want to drink more.

Jeez, he must have been drunk as fuck, because now he was recalling having danced with Lorelai and Luke. Wait, no, Luke was trying to stop him from dancing, he probably knew it would be ridiculous. No, wait, he was really trying to get away from dancing and pushing Jess to dance instead. Why though? He seemed happy enough to have the first couple dance in front of everyb-

Oh, right, it was because the song playing was _The Time Warp_ from Rocky Horror. Man, that must have sucked to watch.

Or maybe not so much. Now he remembered, Rory came by his isolated table after he sat down exhausted - and thankfully too drunk to be embarrassed of all the excessive crotch movement that had just taken place. She maybe made some sort of joke around it, he didn't quite remember.

"Why weren't you dancing there instead of me? It seems like the kind of ridiculous thing that would be in your department tonight. I did notice your hand in all the damn _Princess Bride_ references during the vows."

"Oh. I don't know," she had answered, with just a shadow of laughter in her face. "I am feeling a little under the weather".

"I did notice you were gone a lot," he had remarked, not realizing it was not the brightest idea.

"Well, just a little bit." She seemed defensive all of a sudden. "Also, I danced a lot already, all those Go Go's songs. I seriously think we went through two whole albums. Mom forgives me for taking a break."

"Feeling better now?"

"Yea, thanks for asking. I'll be up there dancing the whole first act of Hamilton in a few minutes, stick around." He smiled and she took a zip of her drink. It was soda, he noticed. _Damn, I was hoping she had found the whiskey._

"You know," Jess continued, itching to ask that question. "You seemed pretty excited with your first few chapters yesterday. I am dying here. Curious as all fuck. Aren't you going to let me read them?"

"God, no!" He remembered her laugh awfully well. "I can't show you a rough draft like that! You are a published author, and also a snob, you are going to eviscerate me."

"Come on, you know I won't." He emptied another bottle. "And even if I do, it is not like my judgment is worth much these days."

"First of all, yes you will. Second of all, don't downplay your credentials. I have been reading a lot about your short stories collection from a bunch of critics I follow."

"Less flattery and more manuscripts, Doogie." Had he really called her Doogie? Jeez.

"When it is better polished. I promise." She did look kind of sick, and also pretty distant. Her words were dry. _What gives?,_ he thought. Didn't she light up when he entered that stupid newsroom a couple months ago? He could swear she did. Though she didn't even get up to greet him, so there was that.

… and there he was again, he realized. Chewing up her every move. _Screw this._ He decided it was a little much, a little confusing, being so drunk around her. His words were probably beginning to slur and it was confusing being around Rory for so long, with so few defenses up. So he began to get away, mumbling an excuse.

"Come on, it is still early. The Jess I knew was not a rookie like that."

"I have been reviewing my habits," he said, getting up. "Realized I was undervaluing a good night's sleep. I love sleep, really. My life has a tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?"

She had laughed so sincerely at this. "I sense you are paraphrasing, but I can't tell what."

"It is some quote dumb people attribute to Hemingway. It is obviously not him, but still has some truth to it."

"But you know what Hemingway did say? _The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector._ You, a writer, and a good one, sure realize your excuse is bullshit."

"That is not from any of his books. You are making that up."

"I am not! It is from some interview from the 50's. You can look it up."

"I will, in my mother's couch. And I will come after you once I disprove it."

He was halfway leaving, but she reached for his hand. It was out of reach, which made everything even more difficult.

"Wait," she had said. "Please stay. Please."

She looked fragile for a moment, like her younger self, unsure of most things. She did seem to want him there. So he sat down slowly, and she moved closer, and she rested her head on his shoulder. They were like that for the longest while, until something or other called her attention, and she got up silently and smiled at him.

So that was why her smell was everywhere.

\- x –

That same day, Jess could swear he was ready to leave. It is amazing how being home and dry had become something like peace to him. Being free, on the run, it is good, sure, but it is only the next best thing. Surprisingly, he had internalized Hemingway's teachings sooner rather than later _– never confuse movement with action._ Who would have thought.

He was shoving some books in his ages-old traveling bag. It was some sort of ritual in every one of his visits, to search Luke's place for some old books he maybe left behind when he was a stupid teenager. You can't go back in time and fix those egregious teenage mistakes, or go back and love right the women you loved wrong the first time around. But you can always go back and re-read the books you once read when you thought you knew it all.

So he went downstairs and said goodbye to Cesar. That meant he would have to drop by the house to say goodbye to Luke. He dreaded it, but there was not much to do.

Rory was in the bathroom for most of the time he was there, which was weird. After having a ridiculous-sized serving of wedding cake and listening to Lorelai's heart-eyed anecdotes from the night before, he got anxious to leave; it would be a perk, not having to say goodbye to Rory, so he was kind of relieved to see she was still in the bathroom. He did hope she was OK, but she was probably just hugging the toilet. Hangovers can be a bitch – that was a point his furiously aching head wouldn't allow him to forget.

When he reached the porch, stopping and searching for his earbuds, Rory appeared by the door. Her blue eyes were almost transparent under that long morning light.

"Weren't you going to say goodbye?"

"I was, but yelling it through the bathroom door seemed like a bit of a stretch."

"Right." She didn't smile. "You know, I was thinking… Since last night, I have that book in my mind. That list of yours."

"Oh, man-"

"I was just skipping through a copy I found at the Gazette the other day. I'm not trying to embarrass you, that is not why I'm bringing it up." Jess felt bad for being so impatient, but the hammer inside his forehead begged to differ.

"What is why, then?"

"I forgot how great that book is. Usually all people remember is the murder part, but there is so much more to it." She had an awkward pause before she completed: "All the Angela stuff, for instance"

"What stuff? She kind of triggered all the murder, so there is a lot to her story."

"The part where she writes Bayardo a letter everyday."

"Oh, sure." Jess wasn't expecting that. "Very early Beatles of her."

"He never opened the letters, and some twenty years go by, and she still writes him. Even when she has nothing to say."

"Why was that the part that got you now?"

Her face got some pink undertones; it was hellishly cute. "I just think that isn't fair. That Angela and Bayardo were mismatched like that"

"He does come back, though. He kept all of her letters. When he was ready, he showed up at her island, or whatever the hell that place was."

"Yes. He never opened the letters, but he kept them. Was that enough for her?"

Jess paused, but he knew the answer. "It was more than enough, I think."

Rory went silent after that. She looked around, unsure of herself, before she said:

"I realized you never told me what it means. That sentence you underlined, next to your list. _Como estar despierto_ … Something like that. I won't go on, I did practice it but you will still mock my Spanish."

Jess laughed, intrigued. "You didn't think of googling it?"

"It felt wrong." She looked nervous. She was twisting her hands a lot and he could swear they were shaking a little. "I wanted you to tell me."

" _It was like being awake twice._ That's what it means."

"But why?"

"Because."

"It means something."

He sighed, looked around, and let go of his bag a little when he answered:

"Those were the things that made me feel asleep. Away. Letting them go woke me up, pulled me back to a place I wanted to scape from."

She looked at him too intensely after that, so he felt compelled to add: "That was the idea, I guess. I don't really remember anymore. It is pretty cheesy anyway."

She smiled slightly. "Not really. It is sweet."

"If you say so." He grabbed the shoulder strap tighter, again anxious to leave. "Well, I hope you are feeling OK."

"I am."

"Good. See you, then."

He turned around and walked to the bus stop, not allowing himself to look back this time. He could tell from the corner of his eyes that she was still standing there; so he pulled his tangled earbuds from his pocket, shuffling around until he found that White Stripes song.

 _And you'll be there if she ever feels blue; and you'll be there when she finds someone new._

 _What to do? Well, you know,_

 _you keep her in your pocket._

As he waited for the bus the whole thing felt like one of his fever dreams. He thought he went well about seeing Rory again; not easy, but he powered through it and now it was over and done. He shouldn't overthink things. After all, all they did was fuck twice. Twice had no rhythm, the beats were out of place. It was not enough for him and it would never be; it was not a good story. Being away was the next best thing,

… but there was still that book burning inside his bag _. Chronicle of a Death Foretold_. He put it there almost without thinking, and now the thought of it screamed at him, making his head hurt more. He could pull it out, maybe. He knew the last word was never crossed.

Now was as good a time as ever.

He ended up not doing it, just like every other time. The last time he had considered it was four years ago; if being with her in that rooftop did not bring him to do it, nothing ever would. Someday, maybe. Any day now. Maybe he should set a reminder: every now and then, remember to check if he was finally able to cross her out of her eternal place inside his head. Every leap year would probably be enough. He was done until 2020.

Jess tried to make peace with that idea all the way back to Philadelphia. The first thing he did once he got back home was to shove that book out of his sight. His bag was left in a corner in the living room – there was nothing there he needed.

A couple weeks later, something strange happened. He had been reading woman beatnik's stories for a while – a long overdue want of his. Carolyn Cassady, Joyce Johnson, Elise Cowan. That new perspective was amazing and overwhelming, so he ended up going back to Hemingway, as he always did, to see if some of those familiar words had changed at all. Once he got to _Across the River and Into the Trees_ , pulling it out of his untouched traveling bag, a small paragraph stood out.

It was not underlined or highlighted in his usual fashion – a mess of pen lines puncturing the paper, full of erasures, blots, obliterations of meaning. It was barely noticeable: two small asterisks locking two sentences inside, full of unsureness, written by pencil, almost ashamed.

 _I love your hard, flat body and your strange eyes that frighten me when they become wicked. I love your hand and all your other wounded places._

Jess looked down at his index finger, holding that page. The small scar was still there, just a little more pale. _Love is a razorblade_ , he remembered. Could it possibly be…

No. Ne was not going there. Not at all. He tossed the book away, took a shower and went out. He would look for some alcohol, and maybe a woman who did want him, to keep him company until sunlight.

\- x -

About a month passed before it happened. The Gabriel García Marquez was still stashed out of sight, the last Hemingway now keeping him company, when Rory showed up at Truncheon.

Jess spotted her as she left the car, and he couldn't help it but go meet her by the sidewalk, unable to wait and unwilling to let her have the upper hand in that sudden interaction. His stomach made all kinds of twists and turns, but by now he knew better than to give it any attention.

"Well, hi." She was the first to break the silence, as she locked the car's doors.

"Hi." They used to spend a lot of time locked in that awkward greeting, he remembered. He would do his best not to fall into those old traps. "How you doing?"

"The same mess you found the last time."

"And the book?"

"It is going great, Jess, it is amazing." Her blue eyes got so watery, even more mirror-like than normal. "It has been so easy to write. It just flows out of me. Is that how you feel all the time?"

"Not at all," he answered sincerely, smirking a little. "It is pretty painful, the whole thing."

"Why do you do it, then?"

"I don't have a choice."

She contemplated the answer a bit – or maybe she was just contemplating her shoes, he couldn't tell. "I am beginning to understand that, I guess. It is nice though, that you are being honest with me."

"How would you know if I am being honest?"

"You are giving me that crooked smile," she answered, smiling herself. "That's the smile you give when you know you are being more honest than you can handle."

Jess leaned back against her car, feeling exhausted already. Her presence had always been so inebriating. He missed her so badly, her voice and the way she sometimes saw through his defenses, her way of spotting the books behind his quotations and the books she always choose at the exact right time. He found himself hoping the wind would blow her smell away, that sweet, contained, fruitish smell. Had she been anybody else, any other girl, he would grab her right there, he would never long to touch her, he would do it like every other thing he had ever done all of his life, without a second thought.

She wasn't, though, and she had never been, so he had never reached for her. Waiting had wrecked him once and twice and it had been hard enough to keep his distance.

"What are you doing here, Rory?"

"I have been reading that book a lot. _Chronicle of a Death Foretold_."

"Yea?" He was impatient but also damned curious, considering their last interaction over the book.

"Ever since we talked after the wedding I keep thinking about Angela."

Jess waited. It took a while before she went on:

"I kept thinking about the last time I saw you. It was not great, the way he left things."

"That's a serious understatement," he said, looking away from her. "But it made everything OK. The ending we were looking for, maybe."

"Yea, maybe." She chased his eyes and his reluctant face, her clear eyes more insistent than ever. "But you never stopped sending your invitations to me. Those purple envelopes from Truncheon. And you always wrote my name yourself."

"How would you know-"

"I've read enough of your defiled books to know your handwriting, Jess."

He laughed at that, but the conversation was still weird. She was driving it mercilessly and he couldn't tell in which direction. And she kept going:

"Did you ever expect me to answer?"

"Of course not."

"Or to show up?"

"No."

"Then why did you keep sending them to me?"

"Are you asking me if I was being Angela?"

"Well… yes."

"That is cruel, Rory, to say the least."

"Like you once told me, I am without mercy."

She made him laugh, and a little of that laughter was pure unadulterated disbelief at her cockiness.

"I don't know what you want from me, Rory. I just sent them to you."

"And I never answered."

"No, you did not."

"I seemed insensible to your delirium."

"Are you paraphrasing the book?"

"Yes." She seemed embarrassed for the first time in that conversation. Then she breathed deeply, like she was gathering some courage. Jess did not know which action made her look more beautiful, nor which made him feel more trapped.

"That is bold of you," was all he said.

"I am just stating something I have known for a while."

"What is that?"

She solemnly ignored his question. "I never opened those invitations, you know."

"Well, OK." He was too unbelieving to feel crushed. "Did you come all the way to Philadelphia just to tell me that?"

"No, of course not," she said defensively, starting to blush like she always did around him - or like she used to. That intrigued Jess even more.

"So why did you come here, Rory?"

"My life is a mess right now, but that book is doing something to me. I had forgotten how I used to do these things, to read so much more. To feel so passionate about everything."

"You did. It was kind of creepy how intense you were about the things you chose to do."

"But you loved it."

"Well…"

"You were always there to push me in that direction when I get lost."

"Which is often."

"But you were always there."

"I don't know if you could say that," he said, now feeling positively scared. Did she get closer or was he imagining that? "I just know you. You are to good to just go through the motions, and if you need reminding, I'll remind you."

"I do. I need it more than ever, Jess."

They were silent for a while. Rory sometimes did that to him, trapped him against a corner. It was a whim of hers; she would get tired of it soon. But it was not like he was capable of leaving.

He searched in his head for something clever to say; there was nothing there. Just when the silence was about to get unbearable, Rory moved forward. Jess panicked for a second before he realized she had opened the car's door. There was something in the passenger's seat.

"That is why I came here."

"What the hell is that?"

"That is my Jess drawer."

That's what it was: a drawer. A single drawer, unceremoniously pulled out of some closet, full of those invitations he had send her – invitations for book parties and theater productions and poetry readings. Everything. Always with her name in one side, and his name in the other. Four years' worth of purple envelopes.

"Rory…"

"There is something I need to tell you, Jess."

He looked at her. At her clean brown hair he had not touched in forever, at her nervous hands. None of that made sense. His stomach sank in anticipation. And that was when she dropped those words, words he would never have guessed he would hear right then, even if he tried a thousand times:

"Jess," she looked about to cry when she called his name. "I'm pregnant."

He smiled what was probably his crookest smile ever. _Oh, that is interesting_ , he thought. That has rhythm, those beats can fall into place. That is a plot twist if there ever was one.

That will make for a good story.

\- x -

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\- x -

 **A/N:** OK, so that is the story. nothing to see ahead, just boring, mundane stuff.

this fic means a lot to me: it was the first time in a long while I sat down and put words into paper. there was the language challenge - a few of you noticed that english is not my native language, and I had never written fiction in such uneven territory. it was a great exercise, and also fun as fuck, and you guys were all so sweet about it! I am always going back, fixing little mistakes; the text will probably never be perfect in a grammar sense, but I loved the process of writing it, of thinking in english. I am excited to try once more one of these days. in the meantime, you can hit me up if you want to give me tips, talk about Gilmore Girls or learn some dirty words in portuguese.

writing this fic also made me read a lot more, searching for the perfect books for Rory and Jess to book-flirt over. it is part of the reason some chapters took so long, but for me it was worth it. I can only hope it was worth it for you too! the book-flirting is important to me, because it showed so much of Rory and Jess' characters. it is what made me fall in love with them in the first place, as I imagine was the case for many of us in GG fandom. my heart was broken into a thousand weeping pieces once I got to the end of the revival and realized Rory simply doesn't seem to read that much anymore. for all of her faults, I love her - being such a big, captivating part of the character get slowly dropped over the years, until the final blow that is AYITL… it is just too much for my Literati heart to take.

so, AYITL. it seriously gave me some sort of PTSD. I went trough all the stages of grief a dozen times before I settled in acceptance: this story is the best I could do in terms of working through my AYITL trauma. everything about the revival felt wrong, and I could spend another 30k words ranting about why - but it is enough to say I can't get over the Jesslessness of it all. that ten years passed and nothing meaningful seemed to have taken place between him and Rory… I refuse to believe that. so I wrote this story trying to fill the gaps and create a headcanon that could mend my broken heart. it ended up being a love triangle-rectangle-pentagon type of story, which is not really what I would have gone for, but it is what I could make out of the crumbs the revival gave us. Jess and Logan are more than just beefcake, they mean something in terms of who Rory wants to be and what life she will ultimately choose. so I tried to make her professional choices mirror that a little - that is another thing I missed so much in AYITL. and Jess' professional life! are you seriously not even mentioning him writing another book? fuck you, ASP. I had a lot of fun playing with all that, even though I don't know the first thing about american politics or the publishing business.

oh man, I have ranted enough already. it was hard to contain myself in the previous chapters, so I am going crazy now. I can't end this, though, without thanking everybody who read it, favorited it, took something out of it. especially, I would like to thank the beautiful people who reviewed HBBH while in the writing. you made me see things differently and the finished product has a lot of all of you in it. so, here it goes:

All the gratitude in my worried heart goes to **Sophie** (very first review); **anonymousgg, scarlettrov, Sa, nousedenyingit, vinkunwildflowerqueen** and **Ame123** (sweet and encouraging); **Droolia** (always very insightful); **AJ** **Granger** (who shares my feelings re: the whole dynamic and called the fic odd - the greatest compliment there is); **sonckad** (who shares my love for book-flirting and dreaded bittersweetness); **jamorenasis** (who wrote me a beautiful short story of their own in their review - it seriously had me in tears, I read it again all the time); **Kim** (the sweetest person, whose excitement is contagious); **Summerbliss** and **J** (who made me feel so much better about the dance scene! Im so glad it worked for you guys!); **Dreaming Haven** (who put all of our strong feelings into words); **DebbieFromAccounting** (a sweet, booking-loving person who pays attention to the craft effort that is any writing); **Kawahara Hikori** (who explored the dynamics so eloquently in their review, better than I did in the actual fic, and gave me great insight for this epilogue - and who seems to be a HSM-loving freak like myself) and **ArdentTVFiend** (an ardent and brilliant curator of Literati fic - I am honored you liked mine). also thank you so much to all the guest reviewers, you were all so sweet and full of good ideas. and thank you also to that crazy person who called me a sick bitch and told me to drop dead, that was fun.

HBBH is over, but I still want to hear your thoughts so badly! did it help you guys with post-AYITL trauma, or did it make it worse? do you guys get behind this Jess-is-her-Luke interpretation of the events? how much do you want to punch Rory? what part of Jess is the yummiest part? (trick question - it's all the parts)

aging, thank you for everything. I sincerely hope you liked it. it is a weird, self-indulgent, wishful thinking mess, but I still loved writing it. so much so, that I am now going to have some celebratory ice-cream. in cooooones.


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